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The Living Christ 

and 

Some Problems of To-day 



The Living Christ 

and 

Some Problems of To-day 



Being the 

William Belden Noble Lectures 
for 1918 

By 

CHARLES WOOD, D. D 

Pastor of the Church of the Covenant 
Washington, D. C, 




New York Chicago 
Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 19 19, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



New York : 1 58 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London : 2 1 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh : 75 Princes Street 



en 1/1 



Foreword 



THE generous founder of this course 
of lectures, aflame with eager de- 
sire that the highest possibilities of 
life might become realities to the young 
men of America in general, and to the stu- 
dents of Harvard University in particular, 
instituted the William Belden Noble lec- 
tureship. Harvard is always associated in 
her mind, as her friends have often been 
permitted to see, with the brilliant career 
in the university of her husband, himself a 
" spiritual splendor " like Phillips Brooks — 
that vital and dominant personality who 
made the religious life attractive and beau- 
tiful to his young friend and to innumerable 
souls once indifferent or hostile. Both 
William B. Noble and Phillips Brooks were, 
each in his own way, an embodiment of the 
spirit of Sir Galahad in whose deep, pure 
eyes men saw God and Heaven. 

It was not intended, as I understand it, 
that these lectures should be addressed to 
5 



6 



FOEEWOED 



scholars and specialists — a mission for which 
I have no qualifications — able themselves to 
draw directly from original sources, but it 
was desired that they might stir a dull 
or discouraged soul here and there to see 
that all they and other men " have willed or 
hoped or dreamed of good " becomes more 
than a dream, or a hope, if persistently and 
determinedly willed. I shall be content to 
play the humble part of the " middle man," 
between the expert on one side and the 
amateur on the other, if I may succeed in 
any degree in restating in terms of life 
familiar truths that still remain abstractions 
for the most part, both to the man of the 
street and the man of the schools. 



Charles Wood. 

Washington, D. C. 



Contents 

I. The Vitality of the Religious 

Sentiment ..... 9 

II. The Availability of God . . 49 

III. Aims that End in Self,and Endless 

Aims 83 

IV. The Christianity of Yesterday, 

To-day and To-morrow . .116 

V. The Place of Christ in Our 

Modern World . . . .155 

VI. Christ's Goal for Humanity . .188 



7 



I 



THE VITALITY OF THE RELIGIOUS 

SENTIMENT 

NOT only is " man incurably relig- 
ious" as Sabatier says, but religion 
itself is indestructible. A religion 
that runs to ceremony and ritual, to sacri- 
fices and sacraments, soon sinks as a sedi- 
ment to life's lower levels, where it crystal- 
lizes and precipitates itself as a solid, which 
may take forms as rigid as leaden molds, 
and as lifeless as the statues of plaster saints. 
Such a religion associates itself naturally 
with abnormal conditions, with unavoidable 
but undesirable experiences, with sickness 
and old age, with medicine bottles, wheel- 
chairs and water beds, with hospitals and 
sanitariums, with Shakespeare's seventh 
and last scene of all when in " second child- 
ishness and mere oblivion " little worth 
living for remains. That religion has per- 
sisted in spite of such associations is indis- 
putable evidence of its vitality. 

9 



10 THE LIVING CHEIST 



Looking for the source of the religious 
sentiment, which continues to be as con- 
stant a quantity as any of the natural de- 
sires or appetites, it was once thought to be 
pathological. Religion was supposedly the 
result like many disagreeable sensations of 
disease. Something must be wrong with 
both the head and the heart of the religious 
man ! His brain doubtless misinterprets 
what he hears and sees and his heart there- 
fore beats irregularly with dreadful but 
unfounded anticipations ! 

Herbert Spencer, speaking fifty years ago 
ex cathedra according to the custom of some 
of the scientific men of his time, satisfied 
his disciples with one of those " full and 
false explanations " as some one has called 
them. He found the source of the relig- 
ious sentiment in the frightful dreams of a 
feverish savage. A barbarian, having 
gorged himself after a compulsory fast of 
many days, is awakened from a nightmare 
by a vivid flash of lightning. He is con- 
vinced that his dream is a reality and that 
demons and evil spirits are as thick in his 
cave as insects in the woods. They may 
at any moment burst from the gloom like a 



VITALITY OF EELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 11 



tongue of flame to scorch and slay him. In a 
pleading voice he cries and prays to them, 
hoping to propitiate their wrath and gain 
their good will. Such religion is the result 
of a desire to escape the enmity and win the 
favor of any Beings that may influence 
the destiny of man. A religion of that sort 
is correctly defined as " a monumental 
chapter in the history of human egotism. ,, 

Professor Fiske, speaking at a dinner 
given to Mr. Spencer when visiting our 
country, removed religion from the path- 
ological, and placed it in the philosophical. 
He asserted, First, " There is a Power not 
ourselves manifest in every rhythmic throb 
of the universe." Paul expresses a sim- 
ilar thought in different phraseology : " The 
invisible things of Him are clearly seen, 
being understood by the things that are 
made." Professor Fiske went on to say, 
Second, " All men feel the importance of 
coming into relation with that Power." 
Mr. Spencer was so much interested in these 
statements that he is reported to have said, 
" If you will develop your theory I shall be 
glad to recognize it as supplementary to 
my own." 



12 THE LIVING CHRIST 



Professor William James, in his lectures 
at Edinburgh on " The Varieties of Relig- 
ious Experience, ,, carries religion over from 
both the pathological and the philosophical 
to the metaphysical and the practical. He 
finds as the basis of the religious sentiment, 
"First an uneasiness; Second a solution." 
Every man who looks into his own soul is 
dissatisfied with what he sees. " The dark 
disaster of human life is the quarrel of the 
soul with God." " When a bad man stands 
revealed only lightning is logical," some one 
has said. 

Every man knows that something is 
wrong in his own life. He anticipates a day 
of reckoning. " There is a fearful looking 
for of judgment." This is reason enough 
for a " feeling of uneasiness." The solution 
of that uneasiness comes, Professor James 
believes, " from a sense that he is to be 
saved by making proper connection with 
the higher powers." He is compelled to 
believe " in the existence of an unseen order, 
in which the riddles of the natural order 
are explained." " Even so, Father, for so 
it seemeth good in Thy sight," is the pro- 
foundly trustful and confident way in which 



VITALITY OF RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 13 



faith expresses it. Such considerations may 
suggest reasons why man is incurably and 
unconquerably religious. 

" There are three ways," it is said, " of 
facing life. First, indifference, which is the 
most common. Second, philosophy, which 
is the most ostentatious. Third, religion, 
which is the most effective." The famous 
Scotch singer of humorous songs, who has 
been not only entertaining, but inspiring the 
soldiers of our camps, tells in his stirring 
addresses, interspersed with songs, how he 
lost his only son at the battle of the Somme, 
how he saw that there were only three pos- 
sibilities in life for him : " drink, gambling, 
God." He chose the last, and multitudes of 
men under his influence are making his 
choice theirs. 

While the religious sentiment takes many 
forms, there are, it is said, only two kinds of 
religion after all. In one, man is seeking 
after God. In all the non-Christian relig- 
ions, the hands of men are lifted up to feel 
after Him if haply they may find Him. In 
the other, God is seeking after man. " The 
Son of Man has come to seek and to save 
that which was lost." Christ speaks of 



14 THE LIVING CHRIST 



Himself as having come not to judge, sen- 
tence and penalize humanity, but to vitalize 
it. " I am come that they might have life 
and that they might have it more abun- 
dantly." The Christian religion, learning 
from its Master where to place the emphasis, 
puts it not on death, but on life. Life takes 
us out into the open, where we are exposed 
to its resistless charm. That charm is a 
challenge. What life is, who can tell? It 
is beautiful in the rose; it is melodious in 
the lark ; it is ravening in the lion ; it is 
everything all in one in man. 

" 'Tis life of which our nerves are scant ; 
Tis life, not death, for which we pant. 
More life and fuller, that we want." 

Religion before Christ's coming meant 
repression according to the most pious peo- 
ple of the religious world. Outside Chris- 
tendom religion still means renunciation, 
the extinction of desire. " Christianity 
makes the great divide. On one side re- 
ligion equals duty ; on the other side religion 
equals delight." 

Buddhism has its Nirvana, its paradise in 
which a world consciousness swallows up 



VITALITY OF KELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 15 



the individual soul as the ocean swallows up 
the rivers, rivulets and showers, but noth- 
ing is lost. " A faith as vague as all un- 
sweet," Lord Tennyson calls that form of 
faith. 

Mohammedanism has its fatalistic sover- 
eignty which differs in no way from pagan 
fate, except by the addition of an incongru- 
ous personality. It has but one virtue, 
submission. With that single virtue it com- 
bines two vices, slavery and polygamy. 

The asceticism of mediaeval Christianity 
authoritatively asserted the necessity of 
renunciation here, in order to enjoy the life 
hereafter. 

Even Puritanism too often judged a 
man's religion rather by what he did not do 
than by what he did. 

The Christianity of Christ is the religion 
of " the expulsive power of a new affection." 
Love is to cast out not only fear, but every 
base desire. "Love is the fulfilling of the 
law." " Walk in the spirit and ye shall not 
fulfill the lusts of the flesh." Christianity is 
a religion of expansion and expression. It 
is the religion of a re-born and re-vitalized 
personality. " I came," Buddha says, " that 



16 THE LIVING CHEIST 



man might cease to desire life;" and "I 
came," Mohammed says, " that life might 
be submerged in the will of Allah; " and " I 
came," Christ says, " that they might have 
life and that they might have it more 
abundantly." 

A reasonable religion is that which wins 
the consent of the whole man. Reason 
admits the candidate as worthy to pay court 
to the heart, and the heart when once con- 
vinced joins the reason in asking the will 
to accept the proposals that have been 
made. Only a religion that gets the votes 
of all three can hold permanent sway over 
the soul of man. Christianity rightly 
understood is such a religion. It is not a 
refuge or a subterfuge. It is a stimulant, a 
reenforcement, a transforming energy, 
irresistible in its most Christian form. 
Christianity, it is true, builds walls inciden- 
tally, but its chief function is to dig wells; to 
plant trees by the rivers of water, whose 
boughs, heavy and sweet with fruit, hang 
over the walls. Christianity roots up 
weeds, but only as a preliminary and prepar- 
atory process for the planting of flowers. 
A Church is not primarily a fortress, a 



VITALITY OF RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 17 



school or a sanitarium, but a garden — the 
garden of the Lord — and as everybody loves 
gardens, so everybody with a heart will love 
the Church, the " Beloved Community," 
when it is true to itself. 

The abounding life Christ proffers is 
essential to Christianity and to the Christian 
for security in a world that is hard and 
cruel. Safety in such a world is found not in 
fleeing, but in fighting. Safety of the soul 
like that of the body is the complement of 
vigorous vitality. " The germs of almost 
every disease known to the materia medica 
are in this room," said a distinguished 
physician, — in a room fairly well ventilated. 
" No one," he went on to say, " in vigorous 
health need trouble about these germs, 
neither will they be troubled by them." So 
spiritually. Those whose souls are full to 
running over with life have but little diffi- 
culty in saying to Satan, " Get thee behind 
me. 

The abounding life Christ gives is equally 
essential for achievement. With but little 
life, we can do only little things. The 
little stream turns the wheel of the mill so 
slowly that the only result is noise. The 



18 THE LIVING OHEIST 



full river sweeps the mill-wheel around at a 
high speed, making little noise but grinding 
much corn. This abundant life is essential 
for our personal satisfaction. We need it 
to vindicate God from the charge of tanta- 
lizing us. The majority of human beings 
are seemingly invited to a Barmecides feast 
where the viands are always removed just 
as the guests are prepared to enjoy them- 
selves. The life that any of us possesses is 
like a drop of water on the tip of the tongue 
of one dying of thirst. " Our whole being is 
athirst. Our bodies for health* our minds 
for knowledge, our souls for righteousness," 
all who so hunger and thirst should be in a 
receptive mood to listen eagerly to Him 
who comes speaking of abounding and 
available life. 

Christianity is a religion that vitalizes 
the whole man for his whole existence in 
this and all possible worlds. " The love of 
Christ is an entirely new power that has 
come into the world as a divine influence, 
transfiguring humanity," it has been said. 
Is this new power now antiquated and obso- 
lete? Is man's longing for life perishable 
and evanescent? 



VITALITY OF RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 19* 



" If your heart does not want a world of 
moral reality, your head will surely never 
make you believe in one/' says Professor 
James. 

" What think ye of Christ, Friend, when all 
is done and said? 
Like ye this Christianity or not ? 
It may be false but will ye wish it true ? 
Has it your vote to be so if it can ? " 

" The Christian religion has been tried for 
eighteen centuries, but the religion of Christ 
remains to be tried," said Lessing. When 
the religion of Christ is tried is it found 
academic and theoretical, or practical and 
inspiring? Is it fantastic and incredible or 
the most reasonable, beautiful and desirable 
thing in all the world? A Christian life is 
the only unanswerable answer. 

There died in Princeton some years ago, 
a woman over ninety years of age, who had 
never written a book, or a poem,— who 
had never painted a picture or composed a 
song, but her life was evidence more irre- 
sistible for the truths of Christianity than 
many documents. There were students 
who listened to the profound lectures of her 



20 THE LIVING CHRIST 



husband, President McCosh, on the Divine 
Government and kindred subjects, and were 
unconvinced, but no student was thrown in 
contact with Mrs. McCosh without feeling 
his skepticism oozing away. 

Many a man who sits as a judge of 
Christianity, which submits itself to trial 
even by self-constituted judges and juries, 
has a secret sympathy with the supposed 
culprit which he is unwilling to acknowl- 
edge. Even the thoroughgoing skeptic, 
as he calls himself, and supposes himself to 
be, may have intermittent doubts inter- 
mingled with his skepticism. So Bishop 
Blougram says, to the doubter boasting of 
his doubts, who insists upon it that the 
Bishop must join him, and the Bishop as- 
suming for argument's sake that he has — 
goes on to say : 

" And now what are we, unbelievers both — 
Calm and complete, determinately fixed. 
To-day, to-morrow and forever, pray? 
You'll guarantee me that ! not so, I think. 
In nowise, all we've gained is that belief, 
As unbelief before, shakes us by fits." 



By the stroke of a pen a man may sign 



VITALITY OF RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 21 



away his fortune, but he cannot so sign 
away the faith of his fathers or of his youth. 
A man may pledge himself never again to 
pray, never again to speak God's name, 
except as an oath, but he cannot escape 
being disturbed by " the power of elevated 
thoughts." "Thou wilt keep him in per- 
fect peace, whose mind is stayed on Thee," 
is a promise given to faith, but there is no 
promise or hope of either peace or stability 
for skepticism and unfaith. 
Therefore, Bishop Blougram adds: 

" Just when we're safest, there's a sunset touch, 
A fancy from a flower bell, some one's death, 
A chorus ending from Euripides, 
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears." 

There is not a skeptic alive to-day in our 
land who will not have spasms of doubt and 
fear, severe or slight, about the religion of 
Jesus Christ before the day is over. That, 
of course, does not prove the truth of 
Christianity, but it goes some distance in 
proving that the religion which is most 
common here has not been so disproved that 
educated men need no more trouble them- 
selves about it than about Buddhism, or 



22 THE LIVING CHRIST 

Mohammedanism, or Compte s Religion of 
Humanity. 

We do not go so far in charging our 
supposed skeptic with believing all that was 
believed by mediaeval ecclesiastics. Prob- 
ably he never has any moments when he is 
more than half convinced that the Pope is 
the vicar of Christ, the supreme infallible 
head of the Church, unless he was brought 
up a Roman Catholic, or that the Church 
itself, Roman Catholic or Protestant, is the 
one channel by which the grace of God may 
reach the heart of man. He does not be- 
lieve in Purgatory or in penance — doubts 
concerning any of these matters never trou- 
ble him. 

Nor do we assert that this skeptic believes 
all he once did. His ideas have probably 
changed very much since he was a boy at 
his mother's knee. After he left school 
and college, where all his religious ideas 
were much modified, he may have spent no 
little time in the painful and dangerous 
process of getting down to bedrock in his 
beliefs; — a process, it has been said, not 
unlike that with which we are all familiar 
when we find that there is more fuel on the 



VITALITY OF RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 23 



fire than can be burned. We take off one 
stick after another until, at last, very near 
the bottom of the pile, it may be, we find 
" an ember that is warm and a place that 
is bright. ,, 

The warm ember and the bright place are 
in every man's heart. All men believe 
something — though they may not accept 
the thirty-nine articles, the Westminster 
Confession of Faith, or The Shorter Cate- 
chism. All have faith in two worlds — the 
external, visible world, and the internal, in- 
visible world. They may not be idealists, 
or new realists, or ideal-realists, but they 
know the things they see and feel have a 
reality that no metaphysics can shade away. 
In the internal world within their own souls 
there is a stream of personality, an ever- 
enduring river with ever-changing drops. 
The old man knows that he is the same per- 
sonality, though not the same person who, 
as a boy, more than half a century ago, 
robbed an orchard and ran away from 
school. His wrinkled cheek blushes for his 
boyish pranks and there is a very fair creed 
in that blush. It marks the gulf not only 
between vulgarity and refinement, but be- 



24 THE LIVING CHEIST 



tween right and wrong. Choices in child- 
hood color or blanch the cheek of man- 
hood. 

Sir William Hamilton said, "Though 
philosophy cannot bake bread, it gives us 
God, free will, and immortality." The 
blush on the veteran's face or its pallor may 
not give him all that, but he may be con- 
vinced, as he blushes or turns pale, that he 
has always possessed the power of choice, 
and that his choices, the memory of which 
covers him with shame, were made volun- 
tarily, and that other choices might have 
been substituted had he so determined. 

When we turn from free will to God, the 
man in possession of unconscious religious 
beliefs may stoutly assert that he will not 
go any further with us. " Here," he says, 
" you pass out of the internal into the ex- 
ternal world, and from experience to asser- 
tion." "We no longer need this colossal 
assumption of the existence of an omnip- 
otent, omniscient, omnipresent Being to 
explain the universe." " With matter, mo- 
tion and time we get the earth and the sun 
that warms it," he stoutly asserts. But 
granting matter, motion and time — which it 



VITALITY OF RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 25 



must be confessed is a grant of no small 
magnitude, we do not get mind — certainly 
not conscious mind. We are all agreed that 
" a stream can rise no higher than its 
source " ; so Carlyle says his hero, Frederick 
the Great, " found it flatly inconceivable 
that consciousness in him should have come 
from a source which had none of its own." 
We may go, with much confidence, even a 
step further. When the steamer Slocum 
sank in the East River, some years ago, a 
boy was picked up, floating on a life-pre- 
server. Taken into a boat, he explained 
tbat his mother gave him the life-pre- 
server — " That's how I got saved," he said. 
" I guess she didn't have none herself, they 
hain't found her." He tells where he got 
his life-preserver, but where did his mother 
get the love that preserved her boy's life at 
the cost of her own? Believest thou in a 
fountain of love in the human heart? From 
wliat heights do the streams flow by which 
that fountain is fed? Christ gives us the 
answer to that question. " If ye, being 
evil " — imperfect, limited, an alloy of gold 
and dross — " know how to give good gifts 
unto your children, how much more shall 



26 THE LIVING CHEIST 



your Father in Heaven," who is the foun- 
tain of all the love that flows through the 
human soul, " give good things to the off- 
spring of His heart." 

But one of our greatest religious diffi- 
culties possibly emerges at just this point. 
Are we not imputing too much importance 
to this Christ, whose word we are accus- 
tomed to hear quoted as final — who was 
He? Undoubtedly a spiritual genius. 
When He speaks, His voice reaches the bet- 
ter self of every man. The human soul re- 
sponds, as a bird to the song of its mate, 
but, as we spring forward, ready to throw 
ourselves at His feet, we stumble on 
obstacles — philosophical, metaphysical or 
theological. God and man are terms that 
signify something. But the God-man 
sweeps us back from the scientific into the 
mediaeval and mythological world. 

" We put into a problem," some one says, 
" that which belongs to a duty which lies 
between us and the problem." Who was 
Jesus Christ? that is the problem on which 
many penetrating eyes of men of piercing 
intelligence have long been concentrated. 
We may not be able to rush in and solve the 



VITALITY OF EELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 27 



problem with which they are struggling. 
But many have reached the conclusion, 
while working on it, that no man can do 
better than " to attempt to reproduce the 
character which Christ's life represents." 
When we follow Him we follow " the 
star which guides a human pathway." 

Christ's spirit of gentleness, sympathy, 
compassion, forgivingness and self-sacrifice 
is the spirit that should possess the soul of 
every man who is not intoxicated with the 
hope that he may yet be a superman. And 
when that spirit takes possession of any 
human heart much will be found in the con- 
clusions that did not seem to be in the 
premises. " He that willeth to do my will," 
the Master says, " shall know of the doc- 
trine." That may not be the logic of the 
schools, but it is the logic of life. 

One of our American poets has put, per- 
haps half unconsciously, much philosophy, 
common sense, and Christianity into " The 
Song of a Heathen Sojourning in Galilee, 
A. D. 32," as he calls it. That may be the 
reason why Mr. Gilder's little poem is so 
often quoted. This heathen supposedly has 
heard Christ speak just a year before His 



28 THE LIVING CHRIST 



crucifixion, and he announces the impres- 
sion that has been made upon him by a 
decision : 

" If Jesus Christ is a man, 
And only a man, I say, 
That of all mankind I cleave to Him 
And to Him will I cleave alway." 

That is where the first disciples, heathen 
or Jewish, began. " To whom shall we go?" 
they said. " Thou hast the words of eternal 
life." Every truth is like a river, and every 
river sweeps the boat that is pushed into 
its channel into the sea at last. 

As the heathen sings, his horizon ex- 
pands — undreamed-of possibilities now be- 
gin to open before him, and he resolves that 
he will be true to his convictions, however 
tremendous and unexpected: that he is 
ready to take the consequences — 

" If Jesus Christ is a God, 
And the only God, I swear 
I will follow Him through Heaven and Hell, 
Through earth, the sea and the air." 



From certain points of view unbelief con- 
cerning Christianity, Christ and the religious 



VITALITY OF KELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 29 



life looks like one of those " circumstances 
over which we have no control," and to hold 
us responsible for it would be, therefore, an 
act of gross injustice. If belief is correctly 
defined as " conviction on evidence," what 
can we legitimately do to change either our 
convictions or the evidence? Are we to 
bring in false witnesses to create evidence? 
Or are we to coerce our convictions into a 
consent against which they rebel? After 
such coercion we should be compelled to 
define faith like the small boy who insisted 
upon it that " Faith is believing what we 
know ain't so." 

The Inquisition was charged with having 
committed both these crimes against hu- 
manity. It interfered with the evidence. 
Torture was used to make the innocent 
falsify facts and to incriminate either them- 
selves or others. Their convictions were 
coerced. They were told that if they would 
not or could not repeat the common Creed 
in the common terms — " then look, just be- 
neath the window is the stake to which you 
shall be tied, and the lighted torch is ready." 

Fifty years ago an Oxford professor, pre- 
sumably a staunch Protestant, with a 



30 THE LIVING CHEIST 



Protestant's detestation for the Inquisition, 
asked a candidate for admission into the 
University about his belief in God. " But, 
sir," was the reply, " I do not believe in any 
God." " What! " said the professor, "you 
do not believe in God. Find God by to- 
morrow morning at nine o'clock or quit this 
University." 

We are agreed that a man must be left 
to find God at any hour of the day or night 
in his own way; and that he must not be 
perturbed or made nervous by threats of 
punishment. To coerce conviction has been 
called the lowest kind of immorality; it is 
not only immoral, it is inane. We must be 
left to ourselves to work out our own salva- 
tion — but to which self? Each of us is com- 
pounded of two or three different selves, 
for some of which we have but little re- 
spect or admiration. There is a passionate, 
animal, basilar self, and there is a higher 
spiritual self, at the apex of which is reason. 
To be left to ourselves, then, ought to mean 
for us to be left to our Reason. To put the 
screws on reason, to tamper with it in any 
way, to attempt to tighten up or loosen our 
convictions according to circumstances, is 



VITALITY OF EELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 31 



confessedly reprehensible. But to screw up 
our eyes in order to see some things better 
and other things not so well may be a very 
commendable act. 

A good woman said she had brought up 
her sons " by not seeing." To shut both 
eyes and ears to certain things which it 
would be well not to see and hear may be 
most desirable. We are warned to " take 
heed how and what we hear." 

We are therefore responsible for the kind 
of witnesses we admit to testify in the 
Supreme Court of our souls. One man ad- 
mits his passions, his appetites, his desires 
to come in as they please — without knock- 
ing. They always find the latch string out. 
He listens with both ears when they tell 
their lying tales of profit, pleasure, power. 
He looks with both eyes, big and round, at 
the moving pictures they show him of " real 
life " on which they insist they have all 
rights reserved, but of which they are will- 
ing to make allotments to their friends. 
These are the only witnesses in whose testi- 
mony some men are keenly interested. 

Another man rules out these witnesses 
as proverbially false — notorious and outra- 



32 THE LIVING CHEIST 



geous liars — and admits in their places to the 
witness box Conscience and Common Sense. 
He will have to listen now to a serious story 
of many responsibilities, rising to the " shin- 
ing table-lands " of duty — home duties ; 
school duties; business, professional and 
church duties. But conscience and com- 
mon sense have also something to say about 
pleasures, sweeter and more satisfying, it 
is asserted, than those that are to be found 
in self-indulgence and gratification; and 
that these may be looked for in most un- 
expected forms and places. 

On the way to India, on reaching Singa- 
pore, the native vendors bring aboard 
bunches of dull-brown unattractive fruit, in 
appearance not altogether unlike a giant 
horse chestnut. The globe trotters, on the 
lookout for the startling and the sensa- 
tional, are contemptuously uninterested and 
saunter off to the other end of the deck. 
But the old travelers returning to India be- 
come excited. They gather around in eager 
crowds and buy all they can get. " Why, 
don't you know," they say to the uniniti- 
ated, " this is the famous mango-steen, the 
most luscious fruit in the world. Don't you 



VITALITY OF RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 33 



know that Queen Victoria offered a hun- 
dred pounds to any one who would bring 
her a single specimen in good condition? 
Break open one of these rough balls, with 
its hard thick rind, and you will find two 
globes of white deliciousness." These 
rough-coated, hard-rined duties, when once 
broken into — and the only way you can 
break into a duty and not ruin it, is by doing 
it — reveal pure white globes of lusciousness. 
So say conscience and common sense, these 
two old guides who have personally and suc- 
cessfully conducted many travelers around 
the world. 

We are responsible, not only for the kind 
of witnesses we admit into the court of rea- 
son, but for the attention we give to the evi- 
dence after it has been admitted. A man 
rides along on a fine horse, which he has 
just purchased, or he drives a high-stepping 
team of blooded bays, presented to him by 
his constituents, or he acts as the chauffeur 
of .his own automobile, which he has lately 
bought, and about the payment of which he 
is seriously troubled ! — A sign stares him in 
the face. It reads: "Stop, Look, Listen!" 
But he is preoccupied and pays no atten- 



34 THE LIVING CHRIST 



tion, though the words have been de- 
ciphered by the eye, and the message 
started on the way to the brain. When the 
engine hits him, if he survives the shock and 
brings the case into the law courts, there is 
no difficulty whatever in fixing the respon- 
sibility for what has happened. In nine 
cases out of ten a jury will give damages to 
anybody injured on a railway. But this is 
the tenth case, and so plain that even an 
American jury does not blink the facts. " I 
know all you tell me," your friend says, who 
has just begun to be intemperate, dishonest, 
or dissolute. " I know it all as well as you 
do." And so he does. He has seen many 
warnings to stop, look and listen. He has 
all the evidence that is needed, but he is 
inattentive and indifferent, and his respon- 
sibility is, to you, self-evident. 

Or there may be attention without inten- 
tion, which is said to be tantamount to 
flirtation. Some of our modern philoso- 
phers, to whom we owe so much, are lay- 
ing increased emphasis on this point. They 
are students of life and the factors that 
shape it, and their testimony is worth listen- 
ing to. " The heart has its reasons that the 



VITALITY OF EELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 35 



reason knows not of," said Pascal. This 
is the same as saying that it matters very 
little what attention we may give to any 
kind of evidence if we have no intention of 
acting on the evidence after it is all in. 
What a man intends to do with the facts he 
is collecting is of tremendous importance. 
Will he shelve them? Will he index them? 
Will he file them away? Or will he act on 
them? Is he merely looking around like 
the so-called " window shoppers " — the 
despair of the shopkeepers — who can tell 
you what there is in every show window on 
every street in town; who can always in- 
form you just where you can get what you 
want, but who have no intention of in- 
vesting in anything themselves, though 
their bank account and their credit may 
be good. 

There are many window shoppers, re- 
ligiously; men and women who know all 
about the work to be done at home and 
abroad. If you should ever want to put 
some money where it would do a great deal 
of good, you would only need to ask them. 
But all our missionaries, slum workers and 
college settlement residents would have 



36 THE LIVING CHEIST 



been dead long ago if every one who knew 
about them did no more for them than these 
eloquent friends. 

We may think of ourselves merely as 
judges, admitting evidence, attending to 
evidence, and acting upon evidence. But 
we are each called upon to play a much 
more positive and energetic role. We must 
be investigators as well as judges. 

A scientist says : " Here are supposed 
facts; let me look at them with my micro- 
scope or my telescope; let me pry into them 
with my pick." A prospector says: "It is 
reported there is gold in this hill, iron and 
coal in these veins, oil in this valley. It is 
for me to find out whether the facts are as 
stated." To be a successful scientific or 
practical investigator a man must have a 
technical training; he must be an expert; 
but for the kind of religious investigation 
the average individual is called to under- 
take, very little equipment is needed. No 
instruments, no tools, and no excessive 
amount of intelligence. The fact that we 
are first asked to consider is a Book. Many 
reports have been made of rich findings, of 
precious gems, of great wells of inexhaust- 



VITALITY OF EELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 37 



ible light. It is for us to discover whether 
the facts are as stated. Every one who 
knows how to read knows enough to make 
this investigation. We refuse to make it 
at our own risk. We must take the respon- 
sibility for the results. 

Tourists in Europe are often palpably 
idiotic. They have gone abroad at a large 
expenditure of time, comfort, money, and 
it may be of health; but for lack of a few 
moments' perusal of a guide-book, many of 
them come back compelled to confess that 
they have missed seeing the things they 
ought to have seen. The experiences which 
would have been of most value to them were 
omitted because of their failure to give a 
little study to the Baedeker or Murray 
which would have told them what they 
needed to know. Our Bible might well be- 
come the pilgrim's " Baedeker." Any of 
us who study it with anything like the atten- 
tion that wise travelers give to their guide- 
books will find information in it of incon- 
ceivable value. Is not the traveler who re- 
fuses to investigate for himself responsible 
for his ignorance? And is not the same re- 
sponsibility upon us if we fail to know that 



38 THE LIVING CHEIST 



which is written here so plainly that much 
of its meaning may be understood at a 
glance ? 

Take from the innumerable promises of 
this book sentences as simple and plain as 
these : "Ask and ye shall receive; knock and 
it shall be opened unto you." " If ye, then, 
being evil, know how to give good gifts unto 
your children, how much more will your 
Heavenly Father give good gifts to them 
that ask Him? " " Pray without ceasing." 
These are personal and may easily be made 
practical. Let a man pray, though he may 
begin with no more confident prayer than 
the skeptic's : " Oh, God — if there be a God, 
bless my soul — if I have a soul." The an- 
swer to that prayer may be the conviction 
that there is a God and that he who prays 
has a soul and that his soul is athirst for 
God, for the living God. 

A man who lives in a cave has no sun or 
stars, but he is responsible if he has all his 
faculties for not coming out of his cave and 
standing in the light. If he is in the dark- 
ness, if there is no gleam anywhere, no light 
in his eyes, no love in his soul, then the 
question is has he asked for it? Has he 



VITALITY OF EELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 39 



been importunate? Has he ever said: 
" Oh ! Lord : I will not let Thee go except 
Thou bless me " ? 

If the telephone rings and we take down 
the receiver only to find that the person who 
thought he wanted to speak with us has 
changed his mind, and v has hung up, the 
unstable and double-minded interviewer 
gets nothing from us. So with many of our 
prayers. We give up too soon: we ask 
hurriedly and go away without waiting for 
an answer. But when there comes a long 
distance call, when the bell rings with a 
persistency which proves that the person at 
the other end is determined to have an an- 
swer, whatever time it takes — that is quite 
another matter. If God seems a long way 
off, let the cry be only the more impor- 
tunate and persistent. 

We are responsible not only for investi- 
gation but for verification. Can moral 
and religious truths be verified and proved 
like mathematical truths? We were taught, 
when adding or subtracting, that by apply- 
ing proper tests we could be quite sure that 
the result was inerrant. The simplest sum 
a child does in the primary school is verified 



40 THE LIVING CHEIST 



by those tests, just as accurately as if the 
addition or the subtraction had been made 
by Sir Isaac Newton himself. 

Are there any tests that may be applied 
to moral and religious truths of such a sort 
that we may be sure our intellectual proc- 
esses have been accurate? In a shooting 
gallery it makes no difference how many 
shots are fired, nothing happens until the 
bull's eye is hit — then the bell rings. When 
we hit the heart of a truth, will bells ring 
or anything happen to make us certain that 
our aim was good? Though there may be 
no ringing bell, may there not be a flashing 
light like that which catches the eye of the 
one who is watching the switchboard of the 
telephone exchange when a receiver is 
taken from its hook? Are there ever such 
flashes in the soul, making us sure that 
things have happened or are about to 
happen? 

When a man is struck a stinging blow 
with fist or tongue, and does not strike 
back, but holds himself in check and, by his 
calmness and coolness, conquers his enemy, 
a light flashes in his soul, and he knows 
then he has found forever the truth in 



VITALITY OP KELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 41 



Christ's sentences: "Return good for evil," 
" overcome evil with good." 

When a man confesses a wrong done to 
a neighbor or brother, though his cheek is 
red with shame, there will be a pure white 
light shooting up in his soul. 

A converted lawyer, in one of the western 
towns of Pennsylvania, who had made a 
great deal of money by immoral, though not 
by illegal practices, called his clients to- 
gether and said to one of them : " Here is 
the deed, my friend, of the two farms of 
which I defrauded you." "And here," he 
said to another, " is the deed for the three 
corner lots of which I robbed you." There 
were great flashes, we may be sure, in the 
souls of the men who got back their farms 
and their corner lots, but what do we sup- 
pose happened in the soul of the man who 
gave them back? 

" The value of a belief is tested by ap- 
plying it," said Sir Leslie Stephen, and in 
applying it may come the conviction that it 
is invaluable. That would probably be the 
testimony of that Pennsylvania lawyer. 
"He that doeth My will," Christ says, 
"shall know of the doctrine." He has 



42 THE LIVING CHEIST 



verified it and made it his own for all 
time. 

Belief is not an inheritance, or a donation 
from our mothers or our fathers — it is an 
achievement. It is not a matter of tempera- 
ment, but of trial. If a man live for one day 
or one hour according to Christ, testing His 
statements, he may then report — even in so 
brief a time as that a creed may grow like 
the blind man's, which, short as it was, was 
yet sufficient and satisfying: "One thing 
I know: Whereas I was blind, now I see." 

Religion is a matter of observation and 
of inference; it is an irresistible and un- 
avoidable conclusion from admitted prem- 
ises. " But the reaction of the whole spirit 
of man in the presence of the realities of 
human life and the universe is not in- 
stinctive," says Professor Royce. It is not 
like the reaction of a bee in a flower gar- 
den — infallible — or of a fish in the sea, or of 
an eagle in the air — unerring. The reaction 
of the whole spirit is the result of considera- 
tion, and of choice. The end desired is 
clearly before the eyes of the man's soul, and 
that end, he has discovered, may often be ob- 
tained by indirection, rather than by direction. 



VITALITY OF EELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 43 



Fervent religious feeling, intensity of 
spiritual desire, is to be had neither for the 
wishing nor for the asking; nevertheless, it 
may be obtainable without excessive diffi- 
culty. In the Yellowstone, among the most 
remarkable group of geysers in the world, 
there are a few like Old Faithful that can 
be counted on at regular periods — they 
play every one or two hours. There are 
others like the Giant and Castle that gush 
very irregularly — once a week or once a 
month it may be, and then again they are 
silent for years. But there is another kind 
of geyser which they call "A Little Beggar " 
that never gushes at all unless you give it 
something to gush for. Toss in a stone or 
a sod and it responds so quickly that you 
must run to escape the consequences. The 
ordinary human heart is much less like Old 
Faithful, or the Giant and Castle than it is 
like these Little Beggars. Something must 
be thrown in if you expect to get anything 
out. Intense feeling is aroused in almost 
any kind of a heart when either an insult or 
a compliment is tossed in. The world un- 
derstands perfectly how to turn the trick. 
It works vast numbers of people into a per- 



44 



THE LIVING CHEIST 



feet frenzy by dropping in facts of a cer- 
tain kind — concerning profit, or pleasure — 
or even imitations of facts. A piece of 
wood, painted to look like a stone, some- 
times does as well as the stone itself, and 
promises may be as productive as realities. 
What if it should be true that there are cer- 
tain spiritual facts, which, if they could get 
themselves into our hearts, would be as 
effective as these secular facts in arousing 
fervency of feeling! 

The experience of humanity is conclusive 
concerning one such fact at least. The fact 
of Christ. The watcher of the skies may 
see only Force, as " a new planet swings 
within his ken " — Force blind to good and 
evil, reckless of destructiveness; "omnip- 
otent matter rolling on its relentless way " 
is what one of these watchers says he sees. 
They hear no stars singing " The Hand 
That Made Us Is Divine." The only sound 
they catch, so they say, " is the dull rattling 
off of a chain, forged innumerable ages 
ago," and dragging us all — stars and suns, 
and earth, and all who are upon it — into the 
abyss of nothingness. 

But these same eyes, looking into history, 



VITALITY OF EELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 45 



have found their attention caught by one 
Form. No other man, or superman, has 
been tall enough to hide Him from the up- 
ward look. That was the real difference be- 
tween Agrippa and Paul ; it was not a mere 
matter of training or of temperament. One 
had seen what the other had not. " I was 
not disobedient to the heavenly vision," is 
Paul's explanation of the peculiarity of his 
life. What he saw in his vision was a Per- 
son. He asks his name, " Who art Thou, 
Lord?" and the answer is: "I am Jesus 
whom thou persecutest." In this Christ 
was made visible the soul of the universe — 
the thinking, planning, purposing intelli- 
gence, from which things, and the great 
order of things have come. Tennyson 
thought from a single flower, if he under- 
stood it perfectly, he could know what God 
is, and what man is. Any one who will may 
from this Christ know the nature of both 
God and man. His kind of a life is divine ; 
can we conceive of anything more satisfy- 
ing to our souls? This is the irresistible 
appeal : " Follow Him ; be like Him." He 
is the goal. 



46 THE LIVING CHRIST 



" Thou the light across the dark vale lonely, 
Thou, the eternal haven of the soul." 

Through this life we enter into such rela- 
tions with God that our life becomes the 
radiant thing, that life was with Him, and 
through this life death becomes as with Him 
a way of going to the Father. What facts 
in the political, commercial or social world 
are comparable to a fact like this? What 
is the degree of a man's intelligence who 
cares nothing for such a fact? 

By the side of this fact, the Historic 
Christ, must be placed the Purpose of 
Christ's entrance into the world's history. 
Prophets called Him the Sun of Righteous- 
ness, but the sun sends out light and warms 
the earth without design or consciousness. 
This is the kind of God of whom men think 
easily, the Source of all things, sustaining 
and controlling the entire universe. A per- 
sonal relation with such an abstraction rs 
inconceivable. The man who stood before 
Roman Governors and Great Csesar him- 
self, was sure of his ground. He believed 
in a God who so loved the world that He 
gave His only begotten Son. " This is a 



VITALITY OP KELIGIOUS SENTIMENT 47 



faithful saying," he adds — reliable enough 
for me and for all to stand on — " that 
Christ Jesus came into the world to save 
sinners." 

The sea was full then, as now, of floating 
fragments that promised much to those who 
were battling with the waves. All sorts of 
philosophical and religious flotsam and 
jetsam were grasped then, as to-day, with 
hope and confidence. They all look as 
solid as ice covered with sand — but they 
turn to slush when the hot sun of tempta- 
tion and sorrow smites them. Christ is the 
solid rock against which eternity itself 
sweeps in vain. " I am He that was dead 
and am alive again." Because saints and 
martyrs have stood on this rock they have 
sung their triumphant songs. Because 
their footing was so sure, they no longer 
needed to think of their own safety; they 
could use their strength in pulling others 
out of the flood and fire. 

They all knew of a salvation from the 
debasing desires, from the degrading lusts 
that have sucked down innumerable splen- 
did specimens of humanity and are still in 
our time sucking them down. They knew 



48 THE LIVING CHRIST 



of a salvation from despondency and 
despair, — of a gospel with power enough in 
it to snap the rattling chain forged long 
years ago and to break up the heavens of 
brass over the Prodigal's head as the sur- 
geon's scalpel breaks the cataract over the 
eye and ushers the blinded man into a new 
world. They knew a salvation from the in- 
evitable doom of purposelessness, aimless- 
ness and good-for-nothingness ; from the 
foulness and corrosion of sin, and from the 
hell, here and hereafter, of insatiable soul- 
destroying desire. " The philosophy of 
passion is getting so close to the facts that 
your thoughts, when held at a distance, 
moved along phlegmatically and frostily, 
are thawed till they become liquid, and 
fired till they become volatile," says one 
who sees " things as they are " with deep 
and penetrating vision. These are the facts : 
Christ and His salvation, ever burning, like 
the bush that Moses saw, but never con- 
sumed, facts as full of fire now as nineteen 
hundred years ago, — facts that, flung into 
the geyser of the soul, will release trans- 
forming energies in the most supine, 
lethargic and indifferent. 



II 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 

WHEN Christ placed the father on 
earth by the side of the Father 
in heaven He did much in mak- 
ing God approachable and available. The 
two Fathers are like in kind, though dif- 
ferent in degree. " If ye then being evil " — 
imperfect, limited, short-sighted children of 
miscalculation — " know how to give good 
gifts unto your children, how much more 
shall your Father in Heaven give good 
things to them that ask Him." What your 
fathers and mothers try to be, that He is. 

Christ created an atmosphere of warmth, 
confidence and congeniality, which softened 
men's hearts and stimulated them to the 
point where it was possible for them to be- 
lieve that God was like Christ and Christ 
was evidently on their side, and they might 
be on His side whenever they were ready to 
49 



50 THE LIVING CHEIST 



give up their vassalage to the world. They 
felt rather than heard Christ say, " Fling 
away your self-sufncience, your false inde- 
pendence, bundle up your anxieties and 
leave them in God's hands." 

When Christ walked with His disciples in 
the fields He pointed out the lilies not with 
botanical or horticultural purposes, but to 
encourage those that heard Him to bury 
their fears among the flowers. They were 
to see that all the processes producing the 
beauty of the blossoms were working for 
them. 

" All the powers that soon or late 
Gain for man some distant goal 
Are cooperant with thy fate, 
Are companions of thy soul." 

Christ called attention to the birds not as 
an ornithological student, but to entice His 
hearers to permit the birds to bear away 
their solicitude in their beaks. Let their 
jubilant songs sweep your souls clean of dis- 
trust, depression and despondency. Strip 
off to-morrow's load from the overburdened 
shoulders of to-day — for God knows and 
cares and plans and feels about you con- 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 51 



tinually as you fathers and mothers feel 
about your children spasmodically. 

Such was Christ's often repeated message 
to the heavy-hearted and tired. He showed 
them unintermittently and patiently how 
God offers Himself to man on the most 
favorable terms. Nothing interested Christ 
so much as getting that offer accepted. 
"Trust God:" "try Him," Christ con- 
stantly urged. " See if He be not approach- 
able and available. Do His will steadily, 
persistently, determinedly and then mark 
the result." 

All men who do anything are doing God's 
will and working with Him — in a way. The 
man with a hoe or a plow or a mower is 
working with the manufacturer or inventor 
of the implement he uses, and thinks of the 
relationship only because he has to pay a 
royalty on the patent. The man who works 
with an engine in a ship or a locomotive is 
working with every one who has had any- 
thing to do in making steam practically 
effective. A man who presses a button and 
lights a thousand rooms with midday splen- 
dor is working with Franklin and Morse 
and Henry as well as with Edison. 



52 THE LIVING OHEIST 



But these discoverers and inventors all 
know that they have created no power. 
They have only applied the power that 
some one else has created. Because they 
have learned to " think God's thoughts 
after Him," they are able to use God's 
things as though they had proprietary 
rights in them. Every man of any intelli- 
gence understands that in every form of 
activity he is working with forces and 
energies that are obedient to God-made 
laws, and when he obeys these laws and 
enters into partnership with God^ the re- 
sults are inconceivable and invariable. 

Such an alliance or cooperative connec- 
tion as this may appear abstract and imper- 
sonal. But is it possible for any mortal 
man to come into such individual and per- 
sonal relation with God Himself that he will 
be permitted, not only to use the things that 
belong to God, but to have intimacy, fellow- 
ship and constant communion with Him, as 
a co-worker and ally? That was the hope 
that rose like an unsetting sun in the sky of 
Moses. He was called to stand against the 
power of the world, as it was then organ- 
ized. He found, after a very short experi- 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 53 



ence, that the task was too great for him. 
He turned his back upon it and went into 
the desert. There, in the burning bush, he 
got his first idea of power, which was incon- 
sumable and inexhaustible. He returned 
to Pharaoh's court, knowing that he had 
been reinforced by the omnipotence of 
Jehovah. He no longer feared Pharaoh — 
why should he, with God on his side? He 
could take lightly the scorn and contempt 
and misapprehension of the Hebrews, who 
continued almost to the last to be suspicious 
of his motives. He climbed the heights of 
Nebo, knowing that from the summit he 
was to look out over the Land of Promise 
which he had so eagerly longed to enter, 
but from which he knew he had shut him- 
self out by an act of self-assertion and dis- 
honoring mistrust of God. Yet he had no 
fear even of seeming failure. The dream 
of his life was broken, but his heart was 
not. His only prayer was that he might 
see more, and yet more, of the glory of God, 
and that he might never advance without 
his Ally. " If thy presence go not with me, 
carry me not up thence." Fifteen hundred 
years afterward, when the secret of Moses* 



64 THE LIVING CHRIST 



life was looked for, it was revealed in 
a single sentence : " He endured as seeing 
Him who is invisible/' 

David, though a far smaller man in many 
ways than Moses, believed that he had 
entered into a similar relationship with 
God. This is the theme of most of his 
Psalms : " God is our refuge and strength, 
a very present help in time of trouble. 
Therefore will we not fear, though the 
earth be removed and though the moun- 
tains be carried into the depths of the sea." 
When he found himself forsaken by all his 
old friends, and even by the members of his 
own family, he was not despondent. He 
looked up and cried : " Whom have I in 
Heaven but Thee, and there is none upon 
the earth that I desire beside Thee." 

Not the least startling of Christ's mes- 
sages to man concerned this cooperative 
alliance with God. It was not reserved, 
He said, for a few like Moses and David 
and Isaiah and John the Baptist, but the 
door into the holiest of holies stands wide 
open for all who wish to enter. We are 
accustomed to divide Christ's work into 
two parts, emphasizing the first part — the 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 55 



reconciliation of God with man and man 
with God ; but the second part, the coopera- 
tion of man with God, we may slur over. 
Christ had many plain things to say about 
His cooperation with the Father. "Hitherto 
hath my Father worked, and I work." He 
prays that they may all be one, " as Thou, 
Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they 
also may be one in Us." " In the domain 
of the inner relations of Godhood and hu- 
manity, Christ has reached the supreme and 
unsurpassable state of union," says the Ger- 
man philosopher Zeller. It was on this co- 
operative alliance that Christ counted for 
the extension of His Kingdom. " Without 
Me," He said to His disciples, " ye can do 
nothing. All power, in Heaven and on 
earth, is given unto Me." " Go ye, there- 
fore — and lo, I am with you alway, even 
unto the end." 

" One man is no man," and even though 
he may join himself with millions, for the 
world's welfare and for the redemption of 
humanity, if he does not join himself with 
God he counts but little. The great heroes 
and helpers are not self made, they are God 
made. " We, then, as workers together 



56 THE LIVING CHEIST 



with Him, beseech you " — that you come 
into this alliance with us. 

From such cooperation there must result 
inevitably the assurance of direction. 
Nothing is more deeply resented by certain 
schools of thought than the suggestion of 
divine guidance. There are statesmen, it 
is true, who unhesitatingly assert that all 
nations which march within the massive and 
clearly marked guide posts of Justice and 
Righteousness, of Humanity and Philan- 
thropy, never lose their way. 

To keep the straight and narrow path 
when great prizes lie alluringly just outside 
the line of demarcation — provinces to be 
conquered and annexed, military superiority 
on land, and naval supremacy on the sea, 
puts the principles of a people to the sever- 
est test. But the nation that forsakes the 
narrow, safe and solid way, will flounder in 
the bogs, morasses and quicksands, and dis- 
appear at last like Pharaoh's host in the 
waves — say men of vision like the Law- 
givers. 

For the Individual the path is blazed not 
less clearly. There are signs that indicate 
infallibly where the road runs. There are 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 57 



physical laws, hygienic conditions, within 
which life is secure and outside of which 
long-continued survival is impossible. 

There is a class of highly educated men 
who give their whole time to interpreting 
hygienic signs. The best physicians of our 
day are great preachers and give us most 
effective sermons though they may never 
stand in the pulpit. They speak authori- 
tatively about temperance, — by which they 
mean moderation not only in drinking but 
in eating. They talk authoritatively about 
the necessity of self-control, of the subjec- 
tion of the appetites and passions to reason 
and conscience. They go so far as to insist 
upon it that there is a heat in venomous 
anger and hate as dangerous to health as 
the heat of wine. 

From all these hygienic laws they see 
rising, not a mere mist, but a veritable pillar 
of cloud which, may be followed into the 
promised land itself. But this pillar of 
cloud, for those who refuse to follow, be- 
comes a pillar of lurid fire when seen in 
manhood and old age from the windows of 
a sanitarium or an asylum into which self- 
chosen paths sooner or later lead. 



58 THE LIVING CHEIST 



Divine guidance is given not only by 
these hygienic laws which are an integral 
part of God's government, but by moral 
laws a softer and still clearer light is thrown 
upon the path. Here is a zone in which 
both safety and security are found and in 
which there is no speed limit. In this zone 
the divinely directed may run in the way of 
His commandments. The consciousness of 
this direction makes all the difference be- 
tween the negative and the positive life; be- 
tween those who break no physical laws and 
therefore keep their health, but are not 
necessarily of any real value to anybody, 
even themselves, and those who are in 
possession of qualities which make them an 
available asset to humanity and who know 
just how these qualities are to be used in 
their Father's business. They are rich, not 
only in vigor, but in veracity, integrity, 
probity and purpose. They have the power 
which belongs — though not exclusively — to 
the rich of making others rich, a power they 
are eager to use every day. Every man 
who is possessed of these positive qualities 
and uses them effectively, makes them at- 
tractive and personally possible in the eyes 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 59 



of those who see this visible embodiment 
of them. 

Such lives appeal to us as unconsciously 
and as irresistibly as all things do that ap- 
proach in any degree to perfection, be it 
picture, symphony, automobile, aeroplane 
or victrola. The more nearly perfect a 
thing is the greater its persuasive powers. 
If men of probity, integrity, veracity, pur- 
pose have also 

" The nourished brain athirst 
For nobler things than lucre ; by the love 
Of these fair things sown wide in fecund soil," 

they are doubly endowed with power. 
They are visibly climbing the heights. 
They are God-guided along the Sunlit way, 
and the call not only of their lips, but of 
their lives, is heard even by the dull souls 
who are endeavoring to satisfy themselves 
with mere physical perfection and self-direc- 
tion. 

Divine guidance is given also by spiritual 
laws. These laws throw their light on the 
loftiest peaks of life — on those spiritual 
realities of which millions live and die in 
ignorance, though they have always 



60 THE LIVING CHEIST 



been within sight for all who have eyes to 
see. 

Sailing for many days along the west 
coast of South America, nothing could be 
seen of the superb mountains a few miles 
away. Though the sun was bright in the 
zenith the clouds shut out the ranges of the 
Cordilleras behind an impenetrable wall. 
There were some on board who did not 
care. There were others who smiled dis- 
dainfully. At last, we all began to doubt, 
if not that there were such mountains which 
men had sometimes seen, yet that we were 
to be fortunate enough to get sight of them. 
One afternoon, when nearly every one was 
asleep in steamer chairs, the captain said to 
us : " Come to the upper deck." There he 
pointed to the sky. We saw nothing. 
"But look," he said; "look again." 
Through an opening in the clouds, as if we 
were gazing into Eternity itself, we beheld 
great white pinnacles thrusting themselves 
twenty thousand feet above the sea. The 
passengers on deck slept serenely and when 
we told them what we had seen they knew, 
they said, " we had been dreaming." 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 61 



"If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness 
And findest not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor. 
There towers the Mountain of the Voice no less 
Which whoso seeks shall find, but he who bends 
Intent on manna still, and mortal ends, 
Sees it not, neither hears its thunder lore." 

What Lowell had in mind when he wrote 
is perhaps what Goethe, himself, was think- 
ing of when he said, " Our blessings are our 
greatest curses." We cling to the lesser 
good and attempt to satisfy ourselves with 
it — " intent on manna still and mortal 
ends " — and, therefore, failing to look up, 
we fail to see the sublime heights that tower 
above us. We try to satisfy ourselves with 
the physical and the moral, and the spiritual 
is undiscovered and, to us, non-existent. 
Reason, Conscience, Common Sense are 
our only counsellors — while our Ally waits 
for a hint that His services are needed. 

So it comes to pass that " the good is 
often the enemy of the best." Look for 
those of whom the world says, " They are 
well off, well born, well educated, well 
placed." You will find many of them doing 
what they can for God and man, but you 
will also find a large percentage of them 



62 THE LIVING CHRIST 



lolling in luxurious homes and clubs and 
motor cars, and chattering inanities in 
social coteries without a thought of the pos- 
sibilities close at hand. The things they 
have and love are good, but they are im- 
pedimenta, holding their so-called fortunate 
possessors back from the best. 

" It is the duty of every man to say to 
himself: Is this aim I set before me the 
highest I can reach? Is the end I propose 
not merely a desirable end, but the most de- 
sirable?" — is the way one of our far- 
sighted, common sense philosophers puts 
the matter. There is nothing more de- 
sirable for God-guided birds and beasts than 
what they do. There will be nothing more 
desirable for us than what we shall do if we 
are as sensitive to the pressure of God's in- 
visible fingers on our hearts as the water 
fowl is to the divine touch. 

" He who, from zone to zone, 
Guides through the boundless sky 
Thy trackless flight, 
In the long way that I must tread alone 
Will guide my steps aright.' ' 

" Thou shalt guide me by Thy counsel," 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 63 



that counsel which speaks to all listening 
ears from hygienic, moral and spiritual 
laws, that counsel which is concentrated and 
preserved in a permanent form in maps and 
charts, of the moral and spiritual world as 
easily understood as any modern guide- 
book. 

Travelers may often be met in Europe 
who boast that they never look into books 
of that sort. " We go," they say, " where 
inclination leads us, and when we arrive we 
ask, 'Where are we?' So we move from 
place to place, from point to point, till life 
is up." They see, it is true, great cities, 
picturesque towns, marvelous landscapes, 
historic scenes, but they have no purpose 
or predetermined goal or guidance; there- 
fore, they can never " arrive." They might 
slip out of life now as well as ten or twenty 
years later, for after the decades have 
passed they will be no nearer any chosen 
end than they are to-day. 

It was to people of this kind that Christ 
said, " Ye do err not knowing the Scrip- 
tures." You have lost your way because 
you did not look into your guide-book. 
High as was the honor Christ placed upon 



64 THE LIVING CHRIST 



the Scriptures with which He was so 
familiar, the sacred writings we hold in our 
hands, giving us four phases of our Lord's 
life, the history of the foundation of the 
Christian Church, and the development of 
Christian doctrine before the apostolic age 
had ceased, are even more vital and inspir- 
ing than the Law, Prophets and Psalms 
which He had. 

A South African Englishman of wide 
spiritual vision has lately said in reference 
to the short-lived Boer uprising, " We 
English and Boers have failed in holding to- 
gether as we might, because we have not 
studied our Bibles as we should. In this 
book we find counsels which would have 
solved our perplexities." Here we read: 
" Honor all men." Boer and English alike. 
Here we find the admonition : " In honor 
preferring one another." There would be 
no more wars in South Africa ; there would 
be no more wars anywhere if men would 
take more seriously such statements from 
the Scriptures. 

We think in our national and individual 
perplexities of specialists in politics, state- 
craft and science and we defer to their judg- 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 65 



ment, but of far more practical help would 
it be for us in our bewilderments to follow 
Christ's suggestion and " search the Scrip- 
tures." Here in this book is our chart, here 
in our hearts is our compass — an unerring 
conscience. 

" Whom do you count the worst man upon earth ? 
Be sure he knows in his conscience more 
Of what right is than arrives at birth 
In the best man's acts that we bow before." 

Our orders are not sealed; they are written 
on the sky and on the fleshly tablets of the 
heart. " Seek ye first the kingdom of God 
and His righteousness," " Till we all come 
in the unity of the faith and in the knowl- 
edge of the Son of God unto the perfect 
man." — To make this the supreme purpose 
of life is infallibly to secure divine direc- 
tion. 

The deepest yearnings of our souls can 
only be satisfied on the heights, and the 
heights can only be gained with God as our 
guide. So say the prophets, the apostles, 
the martyrs, the saints and the philosophers. 
God delivers from the foes that assault us. 



66 THE LIVING CHRIST 

He directs in paths of peace and pleasant- 
ness. He develops our powers. To Him 
we may turn with a confidence like that of 
Abraham, Moses, David, John, and Paul — 
a confidence like that of our own fathers 
and mothers. He who guided them will 
also guide us if our trust is like theirs. 
Only a step or two of the way may be in 
sight at any time, but all the steps will be 
ordered and the end is assured. " Thou 
shalt guide me by thy counsel, and after- 
ward receive me to glory." 

" I see my way as birds thefr trackless way. 
I shall arrive— what time, what circuit first, 
I ask not ; but unless God send His hail 
Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, 
In some time, His good time, I shall arrive : 
He guides me and the bird." 

The conviction of such an alliance with 
God will give life, with divine direction, both 
unity and simplicity. Life usually im- 
presses us as casual, disconnected, inex- 
plicable, like the mad dance of atoms in a 
storm, or like the toys with which boys 
amuse themselves on ponds — little ships 
that go sweeping out, a few yards hither 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 67 



and thither, making it maddening for any 
one to guess where they will be at any given 
time. At what point, geographically, 
morally or religiously, shall we be at any 
specified date in the almanac? 

" We are none other than a moving row 
Of magic Shadow Shapes that come and go, 
Round with the Sun-illumined lantern held 
In midnight, by the Master of the Show." 

Not only pessimistic Persian poets have 
thought of life in this tantalizing aspect of 
which Omar Khayyam sings. Occidental 
philosophers and teachers, and would-be 
practical men and women have had some- 
what the same feeling. Life is mysterious 
and complex to those who are shaping their 
own destiny. But wherever there is a man 
who looks up daily and hourly and prays: 
" What wilt Thou have me to do? " — wher- 
ever there is a man who has heard Christ 
say: " Follow Me," and who is pressing on 
closely after Him, and whose prayer is: 
" Oh, Master, let me walk with Thee," and 
whose delight it is to do the will of God, 
there you will find a man for whom life is 
full of unity and simplicity. He might say, 



68 THE LIVING CHEIST 



as frankly and as sincerely as Paul himself : 
" This one thing I do." 

From this divine alliance will come also 
serenity and security. These are the out- 
come, like unity and simplicity, of constant 
contact with God. " Courage," says a 
Scotch writer noted for his perspicacity, " is 
the first essential for efficient service," and 
courage is always the child of confidence. 
A nation is full of courage because of con- 
fidence in a vast army or navy, or in the 
numbers and resources of the people and 
their territories. Yet both armies and 
navies may be shattered, and a population, 
however numerous, and possessions, how- 
ever rich, may disappear under circum- 
stances that have more than once surprised 
the world. But he who is courageous be- 
cause of confidence in God, who sings: 
" God is 'round about me and can I be dis- 
mayed?" will never find that song falling 
cold and heavy like lead upon the heart. 

With serenity and security, with unity 
and simplicity will come joy and certainty — 
the kind of joy which Christ says the world 
can neither give nor take away. A Chris- 
tian man prays "That we may go to our 



THE AVAILABILITY OP GOD 69 



work as they who go in the company of 
kings." This would be a very joyous con- 
dition for royalists, but with us, for any 
enthusiastic response to the idea of royalty, 
we are obliged to think of kings in the in- 
tellectual, moral and spiritual world. 
Great, has ever been, the joy of those who 
have gone to work in the company of such 
kings. How joyous must those young 
painters have been who were permitted to 
collaborate with Angelo and Raphael, and 
those poets with Dante, Milton and Shake- 
speare, and those philosophers with New- 
ton and Herschel, and those modern 
mechanicians with Bell and Marconi! 
What joy should be ours when we go out to 
work with Christ our King, when we are 
permitted to press close to the Master who 
knows the secret of His art — the art of 
life — and is ready to share it. 

The sadness and uncertainty of the Old 
Testament are the result of an alliance 
which man made with the trinity of Evil, 
the World, the Flesh and the Devil. 
Through that alliance man lost Paradise. 
The gladness and certainty of the New 
Testament come from this new alliance in 



70 THE LIVING CHBIST 

which man, restored and regenerated, sees 
God as ally and co-worker. Then Paradise 
is regained. The Old Testament is the 
book of trembling hope, but across all the 
pages of the New Testament sounds the 
high triumphant note of victory. " Then 
cometh the end, when He shall have gath- 
ered together in one all things which are in 
Heaven and which are on earth, even in 
Him." John hears, after that glorious 
consummation, many voices saying: "The 
kingdoms of this world are become the 
kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, 
and He shall reign forever and ever." 
Here are joy and certainty, and the least of 
us all is called to cooperate in hastening the 
coming of " That day for which creation 
and all its tribes were made." " We then, 
as workers together with Him, beseech you 
also that ye receive not this grace," — this 
privilege of co-partnership with God, — " in 
vain." 

If any ask, " How may we know that 
there is a part or lot permitted to us in a 
cause so glorious?" they may find encour- 
agement in realizing the steps taken by 
those who became allies and ambassadors 



THE A VAIL ABILITY OF GOD 



71 



of Christ. As strangers they first listened 
to His voice that stirred the depths in 
which their souls slept. They were sure, 
it may be, before He said, " Follow Me," 
that the safest and most satisfying place in 
all the world for them was close by His side. 
They became His friends, His followers, 
His disciples, members of the " Beloved 
Community," a society whose interests 
were all one. All were possessed by the 
same ambition-— to have every thought 
brought into captivity to the Sovereign of 
their souls. They were eager to share His 
purposes and plans and to pass through the 
fire in which the dross should be consumed 
and their personality in some mystical way 
merged with His. Paul calls such a trans- 
forming experience " crucifixion." " I am 
crucified with Christ," he says. But he 
emerged from his burning bath on life's 
highest plateau — a new man, " nevertheless 
I live." 

Passing through such an experience — 
and there is a possible Calvary as well as 
Sinai in every human soul — any life may, 
like Paul's, be so joined with Christ as to 
share this destiny, not to be separated from 



72 THE LIVING CHRIST 



Him, by death nor life, nor angels nor prin- 
cipalities nor powers nor things present nor 
things to come. Such a life moves on irre- 
sistibly to its coronation. 

The times through which we are passing 
are so frightfully out of joint as to make 
all such statements sound ludicrous in 
many ears through their apparent incon- 
gruity with facts. The stupendous military 
power, — the superb and startling efficiency 
of a great European nation, has half con- 
vinced the world that after all physical 
force is really supreme. And the only ef- 
fective alliance is with the completest em- 
bodiment of Force the world has ever seen. 
It is futile to look anywhere else for safety, 
security and certainty! A mailed fist has 
crashed through the civilization of a thou- 
sand years. It has crushed customs sup- 
posedly as unchangeable as axioms. It has 
torn to shreds laws as inviolable as the laws 
of light or of electricity. It has bruised and 
mangled hopes and aspirations, believed to 
be an integral part of humanity, and has 
thrust them aside as mere trifles— irrational 
and meaningless like the taboo of a savage 
tribe. The present-day Colossus strides, 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 73 



not two islands, but two continents, two 
worlds. He proclaims, with brazen trump- 
ets, to his soldiers, and through them to 
the world, " There is but one will, mine. 
There is but one law, the law I make." To 
speak of any other force than physical 
power and frightfulness as decisive in a 
world , where the figure in shining armor 
stands out against the sky, is to speak of 
things as they might be on some other 
planet! 

We are not immediately reassured when 
we look away from the dazzling Super-man 
in the scorching place he has made for him- 
self in the sun, to the sun itself and all the 
stars. Here, too, is the supremacy of 
physical force — power inconceivable, irre- 
sistible, sweeping on, as indifferent to what- 
ever stands in its path as a mammoth to a 
worm. "This universe," says a philoso- 
pher, " is a huge bag, swung by a giant 
hand." Every creature able to get a com- 
fortable position in it should be satisfied 
with that. 

But there is another aspect of the whole 
matter, so different as to modify greatly our 
conclusions. It is the aspect we might call 



74 THE LIVING CHEIST 



Scriptural, but we may add also that it is 
scientific ; for not only is the scientific scrip- 
tural, but the scriptural, when it is properly 
understood, is scientific. " Now the end of 
the commandment " — of all the codes and 
laws we find in the Scriptures and nature, is 
benevolence, helpfulness, love. 

Mr. Huxley could not see it in that light. 
" The cosmic process," he said, " has no sort 
of relation to moral ends." By cosmic 
process he meant whatever causes and con- 
trols storms, earthquakes, cataclysms and 
all the quieter phenomena of nature. What 
interest do any of these processes take in 
your morality, or mine? What do the 
comets care about what happens in your 
house, your apartment, your hall-bed- 
room? 

Professor Fiske, who was not so scien- 
tific, possibly, as Professor Huxley, but who 
was perhaps more philosophic, sees the sub- 
ject in a very different light. He asks, after 
listening to Professor Huxley : " Does not 
the cosmic process exist purely for the sake 
of moral ends? " " Subtract from the uni- 
verse," he goes on to say, " its ethical mean- 
ing, and nothing remains but an unreal 



THE AVAILABILITY OP GOD 75 



phantom, the figment of a false meta- 
physics." 

Even our dull eyes may see hints of what 
Professor Fiske was so sure he saw clearly. 
Physical processes, which we may call 
cosmic, if we like, do appear to have both 
moral and beneficent ends. " Law," said 
Burke, " is benevolence, acting by rule." 
He may have intended to include all kinds 
of law in his statement. Law, it is true, 
penalizes — but it also protects, preserves, 
restores. When you approach it in the 
right way, it is gentler than a nurse or 
mother. All true medical science in our 
day consists in tracking law to its lair and 
finding out where it lives, and how it wants 
us to live ; in giving nature the right-of-way ; 
in letting it get in its work. How benevo- 
lent are sunshine, and air, and food, and 
these are all parts of the cosmic process. 

I once carried an emaciated little child, 
on a pillow, to the seashore. She was 
visibly fading away like a flower. But 
there for a few weeks she was subjected to 
no treatment save nature's; she lived in the 
sunshine; she breathed invigorating sea air; 
she ate good food, and her cure was com- 



76 THE LIVING CHRIST 



plete. Law did it. It is only when you get 
down through law to love that you reach 
bed-rock. " Righteousness is the habita- 
tion of His throne " — and righteousness is 
love writ large. 

Professor Royce sums up long years of 
tireless sounding into the depths : " We 
have found in a world of doubt but one as- 
surance; but one and yet how rich. All 
else is hypothesis. The Logos (Divine Rea- 
son) alone is sure." Professor Lotze, the 
great German, reached the same conclusion. 
In his massive volume " Microcosmus," or 
the Universe in Microcosm, he says : " The 
true reality that is and ought to be, is not 
matter, and is still less Idea — but is the liv- 
ing personal spirit of God — the living Love 
that wills the blessedness of others." There 
may be definitions of God more satisfying 
to the intellect than this, but where is one 
more satisfying to the heart? — " The living 
Love that wills the blessedness of others." — 
Think of the universe, of your own soul, un- 
der such convoy ! " Now the end of the 
commandment " — the increasing purpose 
that runs through the ages, " is Love." 

All communities or organizations, based 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 77 



on self-interest, on the right of might, have 
found, sooner or later, the foundation on 
which they built, though seemingly of 
granite, was only shifting sand. 

A very distinguished man has said of one 
of these nations : " The Germans are a 
young people, with perhaps too innocent " — 
note the word — " a belief in force, and too 
little appreciation of the finer methods. 
They do not know that force has never been 
able to maintain what force has won." 
The man who said that was Von Bethmann- 
Hollweg, writing to Professor Lamprecht, 
in 1913. " Every war," said a still more 
famous man, " even a victorious one, is a 
national misfortune." It was Von Moltke, 
the hero of the Franco-Prussian war, who 
so spoke. Even Napoleon Bonaparte, the 
greatest conqueror of them all, on his little 
island of St. Helena, " like a scorpion girt 
by fire," said, in substance : " My kingdom 
was founded on force; already it has dis- 
integrated. Christ founded His kingdom 
on love, and it will endure forever." 

Humanity has moved away from bar- 
barism, not driven by the club or pricked 
by the sword, not under the impulse of 



78 THE LIVING CHKIST 



brutality and animalism, but drawn by sym- 
pathy, kindness, benevolence, love. On 
such feelings families are founded; around 
them tribes have been organized and states 
welded into enduring confederations. The 
promise of permanence for our Republic is 
not to be found in the form of our govern- 
ment, for republics have appeared and dis- 
appeared in other ages of the world. But 
our hope is in the fact that here is " A 
society of Human Souls living in conformity 
to a perfect Moral Law," " and this," says 
one of our philosophers, " is the end to- 
ward which ever since the time when our 
Solar System was a patch of nebulous vapor 
the cosmic process has been aiming." " The 
nation and kingdom that will not serve 
Thee shall utterly perish." Incredible 
revenues, inexhaustible resources, incom- 
parable efficiency, are all in vain where 
Human Souls are not in conformity to a 
perfect Moral Law. 

Love is a force that " no future age will 
e'er outgrow." This was Paul's confident 
conviction. Love, he believed, was more 
effective than all linguistic attainments, 
though he was himself able to speak the 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 79 



language of men and of angels. Love, he 
saw, was greater than any insight into the 
future, than all prophetic gifts; greater 
even than the faith that moves or surmounts 
or tunnels mountains; greater than munifi- 
cence surrendering all its goods to feed the 
poor; greater than the self-sacrifice which 
does not hesitate to immolate the body at 
the stake. Love is the greatest of archi- 
tects. Money may build houses, but only 
love can build homes. When love flies out 
of the window, wealth, culture, or rank, are 
all powerless to hide the destitution of that 
palace or hut 

Love is the only architect that can build 
up the kingdom of Christ Every convert 
from Zaccheus to Mary Magdalene and the 
thief on the cross and the proud Pharisee, 
who had also been a persecutor, was won 
by love. This persecuting Pharisee cried, 
" The love of Christ constraineth us." 
Love is our only reliance to-day in the ex- 
tension of that kingdom to those parts of 
the world that we call foreign, and that we 
sometimes injudiciously speak of as heathen. 

When I asked a Japanese lately what kind 
of work our American missionaries were 



80 THE LIVING CHRIST 



doing in his country, he was not at all 
enthusiastic in his commendation. He said, 
" Many of the missionaries look upon us 
Japanese as pagans and idolators — wor- 
shipers of a God very different from theirs. 
They do not feel that we are brothers, chil- 
dren of the same Father, trying to find our 
way into the same light." But another 
Japanese came to one of our missionaries 
and said : " I have been converted ; I want 
to join the church." And when he was 
asked under whose ministry, preaching or 
teaching he had been brought to Christ, he 
said, " Oh, it wasn't in that way at all ; I was 
a sailor on one of the Japanese warships, 
and another sailor whom I had learned to 
like tried to make me a Christian, without 
any success; but on the day we sank the 
Russian fleet, we steamed through the sea, 
dotted with the bodies of sinking Russians. 
Two Russians were struggling close to the 
side of our ship. Suddenly I saw my Chris- 
tian friend leap into the sea. He grasped a 
Russian in each arm and treading water 
vigorously held their heads above the waves. 
This was too much for some of us; we threw 
them a rope and pulled them on board. It 



THE AVAILABILITY OF GOD 81 



may not have been war, but it was Chris- 
tianity." It is the grip of love holding 
men's heads above the engulfing billows 
that reveals the spirit of Christ. 

We may try everything else, and fail in 
winning men. Argument and sarcasm may 
silence them, but we can save them only by 
love. When we love them and yearn over 
them we shall draw them through the open 
door into the Kingdom of Heaven. " Now 
the end of the commandment " — of creation 
itself, of every nation and person — " is 
love." One of our great modern poets 
makes the dying apostle John say : 

" For life, with all it yields, of joy and woe, 
Of hope and fear, believe the aged friend, 
Is just our chance of the prize of learning love, 
How love may be, hath been indeed, and is." 

And Love is of God. " We love because 
He first loved us." Because we are His 
allies and we feel that we must act in char- 
acter. 

Love is the only force known to man that 
can conquer the subtle selfishness on which 
satanic men count for the success of their 
plans. Lord Tennyson, asked what lines of 



82 THE LIVING CHRIST 



his were most satisfactory to himself, im- 
mediately quoted: 

" Love took up the harp of Life 
And smote on all the chords with might; 
Smote the chord of Self, that trembling 
Passed in music out of sight." 

When we love unselfishly we are not only 
God's allies but His ambassadors and best 
representatives in the world's alien lands 
and we shall find Him more approachable 
and available than our most intimate 
friends. 



Ill 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF, AND 
ENDLESS AIMS 

^>lHRIST conquers the citadel of man's 



soul, not by storming the ramparts 



or undermining the defenses, but by 
throwing a search-light so sharp and strong 
on the viciously defended fortress, that its 
rock of refuge is seen as a strategical 
blunder. The safety which short-sighted 
men have always sought first they were 
confident could be secured by skillful self- 
care and perfectly adjusted methods of self- 
preservation. Is not this Heaven's first 
law? Is it not an instinct, primitive, basic 
and fundamental? Is it not as self-evi- 
dently axiomatic as was the swinging of the 
sun around the earth to every seeing eye — 
until Galileo and Copernicus discovered the 
delusion? Christ was the Galileo and 
Copernicus of the spiritual world. 

What philosophers like Plato, Socrates 
and Aristotle and religious reformers like 




84 THE LIVING CHEIST 



Zoroaster, Confucius and Buddha felt and 
saw vaguely and intermittently, to Christ 
was as sharply defined as the pinnacle of the 
temple against the Syrian sky, and as firmly 
fixed as the rock of Mount Moriah upon 
which the temple stood. The soul that 
finds its security from tests, tempests and 
disasters in self-care and self-preservation 
is playing stupidly into the enemy's hands, 
and after the smoke of the first decisive 
battle has lifted, will be revealed to men 
and angels as having been the unconscious 
cause of its own remediless ruin. 

Many whose eyes have been so opened 
by the spirit and purpose of Christ's teach- 
ing, as to see how completely indefensible 
were the old positions in which short- 
sighted egotism had entrenched itself, have 
been far from feeling any sense of humilia- 
tion or depression from this staggering 
revelation. They have been conscious, on 
the other hand, of a quickened pulse, of a 
speeding up of the sluggish blood coursing 
through their veins. They have eagerly re- 
sponded to the great Teacher's revelation 
of life's real security. 

From the same lips that passed sentence 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 



85 



on the self-love that usurps the first place in 
a man's life they heard an unmistakable 
commendation of self-care in its proper 
secondary place. " He that loveth his 
life " — as the thing best worth loving of all 
the things he knows — " shall lose it." But 
Christ makes self-love the norm and meas- 
ure for every man. By such love every 
individual is to gage the love he has for 
every other individual. " Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor " — not as his father and 
mother, his wife and children love him, not 
as God in Heaven loves him, but " as thou 
dost love thyself." 

There is a kind of self-love that is not a 
strategic blunder, but a universal and in- 
fallible standard of judgment. In the cen- 
tre of such love sits a supreme court whose 
decisions are accepted as final. " Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," and it is 
left to thee to say how much thou dost love 
thyself. 

This kind of self-love is not a bludgeon, 
to beat down every head in sight, that sug- 
gests interference or rivalry. It is rather a 
coign of vantage, and a fulcrum and lever, 
with which every burdened heart is to find 



86 THE LIVING CHRIST 



part of its burden shifted to some one else's 
shoulders, as instinctively as burdens be- 
ginning to chafe on one side are shifted to 
the other. Only by an enlarged, expanded 
and adequate self is any human being 
equipped to play the role of philanthropist 
and benefactor in a world where the most 
common cry is for help. 

The knowledge essential for success in 
such a role in such a world comes through 
self. " Know thyself " is still accounted 
among the wisest things any oracle ever 
said. Knowing thyself thou shalt know 
there is a world outside thyself which thou 
canst touch and see and shape. All sciences 
reveal their secrets only to a self, a person 
scientifically trained. All qualities like 
justice and injustice, like kindness and un- 
kindness, like hate and love are known only 
to the soul that through experience can 
interpret them. 

Christ has every man on His side when 
He calls seemingly for the coronation and 
enthronement of self. " First things first," 
cry men of the world — those whom philoso- 
phers call the " tough " say, " Let us not 
trouble ourselves concerning a secondary 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 



87 



suggestion about loving our neighbor." 
Let us concentrate our attention on self-de- 
velopment with the hope that such a policy 
will prove more practically effective in the 
end than would be possible for idealistic the- 
ories in a hard matter-of-fact world. Every 
man's working philosophy may be of the 
simplest sort, with this understanding. Tak- 
ing good care of number one, number two is 
sure to find in his hands some overflow from 
the cornucopia of blessings. The louder 
the table groans under the weight of viands, 
the larger the crumbs that will fall for the 
hungry little dogs patiently and pathetically 
waiting under it for something to drop ! 

Our civilization is acknowledgedly the 
result in no small degree of far-sighted and 
sane self-love. The savage in his cave, find- 
ing that alone he could not protect himself 
from wild beasts, joined another savage, 
and by the compulsory partnership more 
than doubled his margin of safety. These 
two savages, discovering that they needed 
reinforcements for defense or attack against 
herds of lions and droves of elephants, 
united their forces with other savages. A 
number of such men, driven together for 



88 THE LIVING CHEIST 



personal advantage, formed a tribe. Towns 
were built for protection or for plunder. 
Robber barons established themselves for 
security or booty on the heights. In the 
villages growing up at the foot of the castle 
some one especially fond of children sug- 
gested schools. Later on temples were 
built for the worship of the gods in whom 
the builders had come to believe. As the 
last step in civilization appeared the arts 
and sciences. Is not everything easily and 
naturally explained as the product or by- 
products of self-care? 

Many of our moderns are enamored with 
the simplicity and satisfactoriness, as they 
think it, of this naturalistic and common 
sense solution of the whole problem of rela- 
tionships by the single principle of self-love. 
Nietzsche, the mad mullah of Germany, 
gloated over the rediscovery of the lost art 
of getting all there is out of life by squeez- 
ing it with a strong hand. " One must learn 
to love himself," he says, " with a whole- 
some and healthy love so that one is 
sufficient to himself and does not run about 
in ways which are described as the love of 
one's neighbor.'* 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 89 

Nietzsche had no hesitation in applying 
his philosophy to details. He felt about 
his unfortunate neighbor, ill, broken finan- 
cially or physically, as a multi-millionaire of 
one of our large industrial cities felt about 
the young men, clerks, salesmen, mechanics, 
homeless and lonely in strange surround- 
ings. Asked if he would not contribute to 
the Young Men's Christian Association that 
had just been organized to minister to their 
necessities, he replied, " Do you want to 
hear what I would do with half of them? " 
When he was told that his petitioner would 
be greatly interested in knowing what 
remedy he had to suggest he answered with 
the superior confidence of great experi- 
ence, " I would take them out on a back lot 
and shoot them." The German Nietzsche 
would have claimed our American multi- 
millionaire as a brother indeed. He as- 
serts, " The weak and crippled should go 
to the wall. That is the first principle of 
our philanthropy, and one should help them 

go- 
Nietzsche was sane enough to see that 
the self-care Christ commended was some- 
thing quite different from the self-assertion 



90 THE LIVING CHEIST 



and the will to personal power in which he 
himself gloried. He asserts with truly 
Nietzscheian naivete that " Christianity is 
the One great curse, the One great inward 
corruption, the One ineradicable blot on hu- 
man nature. Do I counsel you to love 
your neighbor? I counsel you rather to 
shun your neighbor and to love those 
furthest away." 

Nietzsche was sane enough before the 
final tragedy of his life, when even the lurid 
lights that had flickered in his brain had 
died out, to see the impassable gulf between 
his teaching and that of the Nazarene, but 
he was not sane enough to see that a gulf 
as deep yawned between his philosophy and 
the experience of humanity. There is no 
warrant to be found anywhere in this uni- 
verse for Nietzsche's confidence that a self- 
love clutching to its heart " those miserable 
aims that end in self," as George Eliot so 
felicitously calls them, can ever succeed in 
winning out and gaining those aims. The 
great Gulf Stream that has borne humanity 
forward flows in an opposite direction. 

Both Darwin and Spencer, as well as the 
Russian Kropotkin, were tremendously im- 



AIMS THAT END W SELF 



91 



pressed by discovering side by side with the 
fierce blood-stained struggle for life a simul- 
taneous struggle for the life of others for 
" mutual aid." .The mother bird surrendering 
a dainty morsel to her brood ; the tiger roar- 
ing with hunger, while he carries home an 
antelope in his jaws to his half-starved 
cubs ; the savage returning to his cave faint 
for lack of food after a long day spent along 
the river or around the lake with a fish 
clutched in his hand for his mate and their 
dusky brood ; the philanthropist sharing his 
last crust like Sir Launfal with the beggar ; 
the martyr giving his body to be burned, 
when the slightest signal of surrender would 
have set him free, — these are evidences of 
a higher law than the law of self-preserva- 
tion, a law that runs through nature from 
top to bottom. As Browning looked at it 
he cried, " All's law, yet all's love." This 
is a struggle as self-evident and as vitally 
significant as the struggle for life. Darwin 
gives it the first place in importance. 
" Those communities which include the 
greatest number of the most sympathetic 
members would flourish best and rear the 
greatest number of offspring." 



92 THE LIVING CHEIST 



" Those miserable aims which end in 
self " will inevitably make the quietus of 
all who are satisfied with them. " The 
selfish man," it has been pointed out, " bores 
with a big auger; the deeper he goes the 
harder it is to turn." Egotism dies of heart 
failure from the fatal infection of ingrow- 
ing malignancy. Self-care, self-preservation, 
self-love, the red-clawed struggle for life 
are only half hinges. However massive 
and strong they may seem to be they are 
ineffective and impotent until joined with 
the other half : — philanthropy, self-sacrifice, 
the struggle for the life of others. 

This is the seeming " paradox of Chris- 
tianity," as it has been called. " By giving 
we get, by losing we gain, by dying we 
live." " It is more blessed to give than to 
receive." This is the paradox of the sol- 
dier's life as well as of the Christian's. The 
soldier must be strong enough to give a 
good account of himself. He must protect 
the trenches, the citadel, the salient, but 
he must not count his life dear. Life is the 
coin with which he buys the pearl of great 
price, — liberty, justice, the triumph of 
righteousness. When Sir Garnett Wolsey 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 



93 



was asked by the cadets of Aldershot what 
a man must do to become a general at fifty, 
he replied unhesitatingly, " le must try to 
get himself killed in every battle." He 
must do his duty without any thought of 
danger, which is another way of saying, 
" He that loveth his life shall lose it." 

We are in a universe where only those 
who believe that the great order of things 
is reasonable; that the supreme Power 
which creates, controls, adjusts is " The 
Living Love that Wills the Blessedness of 
Others " will have the courage to make the 
venture of immediate surrender to that 
Love. They alone see, like Donald Hankey 
in " The Student in Arms," that " faith is 
betting your life that there is a God," but it 
is also betting your life that a life in har- 
mony with God is a life that must arrive, 
and that every other life must inevitably 
lose its way. "The Supreme problem of our 
time " — so sane men assert, is " What is 
the path to self-realization?" "How 
achieve emancipation from the common 
place?" Is there any solution to this su- 
preme problem or is there even a suggestion 
that a solution may anywhere be found? 



94 THE LIVING CHEIST 



When Theseus landed on the Island of 
Crete his fate supposedly was sealed. He 
was one of seven youths and seven maidens 
sent that year as usual, as an offering to 
the pride of the Cretan King Minos. In 
the centre of the island was a vast labyrinth 
in which crouched a man-eating monster — 
the Minotaur. On the road leading to the 
labyrinth, all footsteps entered but none 
returned. The Princess Ariadne, the 
daughter of Minos, pitied the young hero 
and thought it a shame that one so strong 
and brave should have so short a life. She 
put into his hand a sword with which to 
slay the monster, and a silken thread with 
which, when victorious, he could find his 
way back. So equipped, Theseus con- 
quered the devourer and returned in safety. 
Is there any such sword for our protection 
and any such thread for our guidance in the 
labyrinthine mazes of life? In a single 
sentence, " Seek ye first the Kingdom of 
God," Christ has given both a sword for 
defense and a thread for guidance. A 
sword of steel may snap and a thread of silk 
may break, but the deliverance that comes 
from obedience to His laws can never fail. 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 95 



" Remember the profound and beautiful 
words of Jesus which would put an end to 
all our troubles and discords if listened to," 
said the French Lavaleye : — " Seek ye first 
the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, 
and all these things shall be added unto 
you." 

This imperative, which is at the same 
time an exhortation and a promise, is also 
a principle which President Mark Hopkins, 
of Williams College, loved to elaborate to 
his classes and in his books, with a convinc- 
ing array of illustrations. It is the comple- 
ment of Christ's first law that " he that 
loveth his life shall lose it." It is the prin- 
ciple or law that seeking the best we secure 
also the good as a kind of by-product. 
" Godliness is profitable unto all things, hav- 
ing the promise of the life that now is, as 
well as that which is to come." 

All the scientists are illustrations of this 
principle. These men of rare gifts and 
indomitable purpose make opportunities of 
obstacles. They are keen on the scent of 
undiscovered substances and forces. They 
pry into mysteries; and they scan monu- 
ments; they study nature's methods and 



96 THE LIVING CHRIST 



ways. The most successful of them are 
possessed by the same scientific spirit which 
made our own Professor Agassiz say, " I 
have no time to make money." Lovers of 
truth and knowledge for their own sake 
never have. They think of money only 
incidentally. There are many other things 
which bulk more largely in their eyes, and 
which they appraise at a much higher value. 
They are on the lookout for treasures no 
one has yet found; for an antitoxin for 
grippe; for an antidote for cancer; for some 
method of extracting energy directly from 
the air. Let them find what they seek, and 
wealth " beyond the dreams of avarice " 
will be poured into their hands. They are 
seeking the best, and securing it they will 
secure also the good of which they have 
thought but little. 

All artists, painters, and musicians; all 
poets and specialists of every sort, as well 
as scientists, are evidences of the univer- 
sality and invariability of Christ's law. They 
are all alike seekers — so far as they deserve 
their titles — not of pelf, but of perfection — 
in color, in harmony and in the consum- 
mation of their hopes. The greatest of 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 97 

these " dead but sceptered sovereigns whose 
spirits still rule ours from out their urns " 
cared nothing whatever for money or fame. 
They painted pictures; they composed 
symphonies; they carved statues; they 
wrote poetry; and not one of them, it may 
be, was a multi-millionaire or a popular 
favorite in the day in which he lived. 
But who has added as much to the wealth 
of Italy as Raphael and Dante? Who 
has enriched Austria and Holland like 
Handel, Beethoven and Reubens, or Ger- 
many like Goethe, Schiller, Luther and 
Wagner, or England like Shakespeare and 
Milton? Any of these might have had, if 
they had insisted upon it, the revenues of 
provinces, the perpetual praises of admiring 
multitudes; but of all this they thought 
little. 

While we may see that there is at least a 
semblance of truth that both money and 
fame may come as by-products to those 
who have sought for nobler and better 
things, — yet when we come to Power, 
which all men desire, must we not confess 
that the principle of Christ's law no longer 
holds? To get power, men are now con- 



98 THE LIVING CHEIST 



vinced we must have " the will for it," and 
make all else subservient to it. The pop- 
ular school raises the cry when it is sug- 
gested that " the will to serve " is a sign 
of a higher civilization than " the will to 
power " — " Remember Jesus Christ and 
where His will to serve brought Him, and 
where it will bring every one who accepts 
His theories of life." "We frankly con- 
fess," they say, " we want a throne, not a 
cross; we want crowns of gold, not crowns 
of thorns." But for power, splendid, en- 
during and wide-sweeping, has any throne 
yet raised upon the earth possessed power 
comparable with that of the Cross? What 
pygmies all kings and world conquerors are 
when measured against the King whose 
throne was an instrument of torture, and 
whose crown was of agony! Though men 
may rob Him of His divinity, they cannot 
succeed in stripping Him of world-wide 
sovereignty. The American sculptor, W. 
W. Story, may have had his own Chris- 
tology ; but his indignant protest rings in the 
ears of those who would minify Christ's 
power and triumph compared with the 
triumphs of the world's heroes. 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 



99 



" Speak, History, who are life's victors ? Unroll 
thy long annals and say : 

Are they those whom the world called its vic- 
tors ? — who won the success of a day ? 

The martyrs or Nero ? The Spartans who fell 
at Thermopylae's tryst? 

Or the Persians and Xerxes, His judges, or 
Socrates, Pilate or Christ ? " 

A man may have the strength of many 
giants, and the subtlety of countless ser- 
pents, but he can neither crush this law that 
Christ announces under his feet nor wriggle 
out from its minute meshes. 

What life has made clear to us on the 
lower planes where Money and Fame and 
Power stand out so clearly against the sky- 
line, Christ explains is equally true every- 
where. " Seek ye first the Kingdom of 
God and His righteousness " — make this 
Kingdom of God, the Kingdom in which 
God's rule is joyously accepted by loyal 
hearts, the Kingdom in which righteousness 
is primary and all successes separated from 
righteousness but a shadow without sub- 
stance — your first object and aim—" and 
all these things shall be added." "An 
ultimate end " is defined as " that which we 



100 THE LIVING CHRIST 



seek for its own sake, as good in itself." 
This kingdom is to be, Christ says, such an 
end. " A supreme end," the same authority 
adds, " is an ultimate end made by us para- 
mount to all others." Christ tells us that 
this kingdom is to be, not only an ultimate 
but a supreme and endless aim. " Of His 
Kingdom there shall be no end." He does 
not say that we are never to concern our- 
selves with any secondary end. The dis- 
ciples He taught, taught their disciples that 
though a man insist upon it, that he is seek- 
ing this kingdom and nothing but this king- 
dom, yet " if he will not work neither shall 
he eat." Make this kingdom the primary 
and fundamental purpose, object and aim of 
life, and all those things which we are ac- 
customed to classify as necessary will be 
added. 

It is possible to smile over such a principle 
but it is impossible not to see that if any one 
can be so simple or so credulous as to accept 
it unreservedly the results will be undenia- 
ble. " You must understand," it is said 
deprecatingly, " that there is nothing mys- 
terious about it." " It is the inevitable and 
indissoluble relation of cause and effect. If 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 101 



we walk in the spring in forest or garden 
we come back with sweet odors in our 
garments." " If we live in close contact 
with spiritual things we carry a spiritual 
atmosphere with us unconsciously, with- 
out any direct effort on our part." " If we 
believe that there is a city which hath foun- 
dations, which is infinitely more glorious 
than any of the cities of earth, shall we fail 
to see its beauty and hear the melody of its 
bells — if we seek for such a city, even 
though it might have no existence in 
reality, must we not become the uncon- 
scious possessors of qualities such as 
veracity, integrity, industry, sobriety and 
self-control?" These are the qualities 
without which no one need apply for em- 
ployment, even to men who think the king- 
dom of which Christ talks is altogether 
Utopian and Arcadian. " Yes such a faith 
as yours," says the man of the world, 
" groundless as it may be, and as we think 
it is, will, of course, save you if you honestly 
accept it, from servility and covetousness, 
from subserviency, pride and envy, from ap- 
petite, animalism and anxiety." " Depend- 
ence upon a God who may be only imagi- 



102 THE LIVING CHRIST 



nary, and upon His will, of which in point of 
fact we are entirely ignorant, must make 
any man what the Puritans in Cromwell's 
Ironsides were," writes a critic who is not 
too sympathetic. 

Such a man, it is admitted, so far as he is 
logical, will put religion in what religious 
people call " the right place." Men of the 
world have a place for religion. It is the 
place that nothing else wants. If they have 
any of it they keep it in cold storage, to be 
brought out on special occasions like fu- 
nerals and weddings, Thanksgivings, and 
openings of Congress. They arrange a few 
of the best specimens of it in the shop win- 
dow where they present a brave^appearance 
in the eyes of the passers-by. Religion, as 
they think of it, is an article much too rare 
and fine for the rough and tumble of daily 
life. 

But if a man starts out to be a Christian, 
he must put his religion where Christ wants 
it, not necessarily in the most prominent 
place, but certainly in the most significant 
place. It must be like the rudder of a ship, 
though out of sight, giving direction to the 
whole vessel, whether it be a light and 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 103 



graceful yacht or a majestic dreadnaught. 
The man who does this will win the invol- 
untary approval even of irreligious men. 
Looking around for a trustee for their 
estates or for a guardian for their children, 
or for a reliable person for a position of 
extreme importance in either private or 
public life, it is this kind of a man they 
want. But all this, my unbelieving friend 
says, " merely shows us how very human 
Christ was, and how clearly He saw into 
the real philosophy of life, which is nine 
parts common sense." Everything that 
Christ said seems simple when we try it out 
and find how true it is — all His statements 
are universal, infallible and eternal prin- 
ciples. 

Seeming exceptions to this promise to 
those who seek the best are only apparent. 
They are rather what some one called 
" withheld completions." Our range of 
vision may be too limited for us to detect 
final results. " In the long run," says Mr. 
Froude, " it is well with the good, and ill 
with the bad." It is true that every one of 
the charter members of the society called 
the Church, — every subject in the kingdom 



104 THE LIVING CHRIST 



Christ established, probably met a violent 
death. Was not this promise an absurdity 
read in the light of flaming torches on the 
Vatican hill, every torch a Christian en- 
swathed in burning garments? This, at 
least, must be said. Martyrs facing mar- 
tyrdom had no sense of failure, and ex- 
pressed no regret that they had trusted 
Christ unreservedly. Paul is their most 
convincing and eloquent spokesman. " I 
have fought a good fight, I have finished 
my course, I have kept the faith, hence- 
forth there is laid up for me a crown of 
righteousness." — Ah, yes, in the future ; but 
in the present — only the Mamertine prison 
and the headsman's axe at the Three 
Fountains! But he speaks again, and he is 
talking now only about the present. " I 
have all things and abound." We must 
accept such testimony at its face value. 
They believed that all things were added; 
that they really had what they most wanted. 
We might not agree with them, but on the 
other hand it is quite possible that if we 
saw as clearly as they did we should no 
longer want many things that we now de- 
sire. 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 105 



" God nothing doe? nor suffers to be done 
But what thou would'st thyself could'st thou 
but see 

Through all the events of things as well as 
He." 

Considering the cases of those who at the 
present time feel that they have not been 
fairly treated — that while they have sought 
first God's kingdom and righteousness, 
they have been woefully disappointed in 
the results — something may be said. In all 
such cases there must always be an element 
of doubt as to just how far the seeming 
exception had fulfilled the conditions. This 
particular saint has failed in everything! 
Nothing has been added; nothing has suc- 
ceeded. But was he a saint? Did he 
actually seek first the kingdom, or did he 
make a brave attempt to work the kingdom 
for his own interests, though men did not 
find him out? They who sought Christ 
merely for the excitement of being with 
Him, or for the purpose of getting bread 
without buying it, or working for it, had 
only a temporary and unsatisfying suc- 
cess — and " they had their reward." Christ 



106 THE LIVING CHEIST 



knew what was in man. He said, " You 
seek me for the loaves and fishes." 

Who serves God simply because he gets 
paid for it, or expects to get paid for it, 
does not serve Him at all. Whenever we 
hear the mournful complaint, " Lo, these 
many years do I serve Thee, and Thou never 
gavest me a kid," we know that the service 
rendered was not the service which is dear- 
est to a father's heart. The man who says, 



" I have been a Christian from my youth 
up, see what God has done for me," may 
have cause for complaint, but the burden 
of proof is on his side. He might without 
exaggeration possibly say of himself as 
Helen Hunt wrote of herself, penitent in 
part it may be for sins she had not com- 
mitted, " So clear I see the things I thought 
were right or harmless were a sin." 

Whenever we find ourselves in a mathe- 
matical mood, thinking of so many years of 
service on account of which so much surely 
must have been placed to our credit, we are 
apt to discover in some unexpected way 
that our account has been overdrawn. Our 
first supposition may be that we have com- 
mitted a colossal error somewhere, but the 




AIMS THAT END IN SELF 107 



error we have really committed may have 
been in our own eyes a very diminutive one. 
In spite of all our professions and protesta- 
tions, we have had our eye on our own 
projects, which we are convinced are of 
more value to us than the Kingdom of God, 
its progress, development and extension. 
In our subconsciousness, while thinking of 
our personal aggrandizement, we yet ex- 
pected self-seeking, to garner the rewards 
reserved only for self-surrender and self- 
sacrifice. " Seek ye first the Kingdom of 
God and His righteousness. ,, This com- 
mand, exhortation, promise perpetually 
presses itself upon all hearts. They who 
accept it have like Theseus a sword for pro- 
tection, and a thread for guidance whatever 
monsters may be waiting in the maze-like 
labyrinth of the future. " This clue familiar 
to our hand will lengthen as we go, and 
never break." 

These are they who carry in their hearts 
a hope that must complete itself in the end- 
less life that lies just ahead. This as Paul 
sees it is " Christ in you the hope of 
glory." 



108 THE LIVING CHRIST 



" Thou Life within my life, than self more near, 
Thou Veiled Presence infinitely clear, 
From all illusive shows of sense I flee, 
To find my center and my rest in Thee." 

In Christ Paul saw the possibilities and 
promise of endless aims, of perfected ideals, 
ever expanding. Christlikeness was for 
him the only convincing evidence of the 
presence in his or any other personality of 
the indwelling Christ. The world stands 
with the apostle there. The only kind of 
Christianity it cares anything about is 
Christlikeness. This was the most primi- 
tive and is still the most potent form of the 
religion of Jesus. 

This takes us out immediately under the 
sky. We leave behind us ecclesiastical or- 
ganizations and the subtleties of theological 
creeds — too often considered synonymous 
with Christianity. If to be a Christian is a 
matter, at least at the start, of imitation, 
any man can qualify. We are all born 
imitators. Even savages are mimics. A 
Tierra del Fuegian made Darwin laugh as 
he imitated his walk and gestures with 
absolute accuracy. Children as well as 
savages early exhibit the mimetic faculty. 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 



109 



In their playthings, games, tools and dress, 
they are always reproducing what they see 
some one else do. The way they speak their 
mother tongue is due to imitation. Very 
simple words are pronounced one way in 
Boston, another in Philadelphia, and still 
another in New Orleans. Children learn to 
write as well as speak by imitation. At the 
top of the page of the writing book of long 
ago there was written in a bold, beautiful 
hand, " Honesty is the best policy." Over 
and over again, all down the page, the same 
words were repeated as nearly in the same 
way as possible. Drawing and painting, as 
well as writing, are taught by imitation. 
" Here is a rose, draw that." " Here is a 
horse, paint that as much like the model as 
you can." 

Hero worship, to which all children are 
more or less prone, is the imitation of an 
ideal personified in some playmate, usually 
a year or "two otder. Every school is a 
temple in which such heroes and heroines 
are constantly worshiped, — not always alas 
to the benefit of the worshiper. The dis- 
ciple is an imitator of his Master. James 
and John, disciples of John the Baptist, were 



110 THE LIVING CHRIST 



undoubtedly trying to be as much like him 
as they could. The Baptist, with marvelous 
magnanimity, urged them to leave him as 
an imperfect model. " See," he said, " yon- 
der is one much more worthy of imitation." 
"Behold the Divine Man." Christ calls 
them to Himself. " Come," He cries, " fol- 
low Me." And that following meant not 
merely a change of locality, but of ideal. 
Henceforth they were to imitate Him in- 
stead of the prophet clothed in camel's hair 
and living in the desert on honey. 

Imitation of Christ, if sincere, is the in- 
troduction to the appropriation of Christ. 
This is an unconscious process often, like 
that which turns the dyer's hand the color 
of the stuff in which he works. Mind and 
heart alike appropriate the hue of that 
about which we think and which w*e love. 
If we meditate much on money, on popu- 
larity, on advancement, if we love the things 
that make for personal aggrandizement, we 
become earthy, sensual, devilish. But if 
Christ is the sun in our intellectual heavens, 
our thoughts will revolve around Him. Our 
emotions will respond to His care and love. 
We shall altogether appropriate and assimi- 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 



111 



late Him till the world shall be surprised 
in seeing that there are hitherto undis- 
covered resemblances between Him and 
us. 

The worshiper of Bacchus became bloated 
and bestial, like the bibulous little god he 
adored. The worshiper of Venus became 
leprous and lecherous, like the sensual god- 
dess of whom he was a devotee. It is quite 
as true on the ascending as on the descend- 
ing scale. If we adore Christ and persist 
in imitating Him, we shall become gentle, 
beneficent, helpful and Christlike. 

This appropriation will be the prelude to 
the incorporation of Christ in our lives and 
of our identification with Him. The blend- 
ing of individualities is not mysticism or 
fanaticism. " Unity of purpose always re- 
sults," it is said, " in unification of person- 
ality." The disciple merges into the Mas- 
ter. The line of demarcation, even in their 
work, is hard to detect. The " School " of 
Raphael, of Michelangelo, of Beethoven and 
Mozart was in each case made up of scholars 
who studied the thoughts and acts and man- 
ner and mannerisms of their respective mas- 
ters till the product they turned out was so 



112 THE LIVING CHEIST 

like that of those they imitated that even 
the skilled eye was often deceived. 

" No self is its whole self which is itself 
alone," it is asserted. " Part of the self- 
hood of everything is in its share in a com- 
plete being of which it is a part." The 
disciple loses nothing and gains much by 
this blending of personality. When the 
soul sees in Christ its Lord, when it finds in 
Him the human manifestation of divinity, 
and roots itself in Him and there only feels 
itself at home, life here on the earth for that 
soul is enriched with heavenly joy. 

By such identification with Christ through 
imitation of Him we open the sluice gates 
and power rushes in. "Without Me," He 
says, as He sees the gates are shut, " ye can 
do nothing." " With Me," He says, as the 
gates swing open, " ye shall do even greater 
things than those ye have seen Me do." 

As we behold here and there those shin- 
ing ones who have imitated Christ in their 
thoughts and acts, who have appropriated 
His qualities, who have identified their in- 
dividuality with His, who can say " we have 
been crucified with Christ, nevertheless we 
live, yet not we, but Christ liveth in us," we 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 



113 



may see at the same time how far short 
we have come in anything but a mechanical 
and ineffective imitation of our Master. We 
may have resembled Him only as Thomas 
a Kempis says the great saints of his day 
were like Him in " avoiding the society of 
men " — which was in fact a difference rather 
than a resemblance. However fond we 
may be of society of some kind, we may 
have carefully avoided association with the 
uncongenial and the undesirable. Much 
work we have left unattempted, possibly be- 
cause those who were engaged in doing it 
were to us unattractive. But just these 
undesirable, uncongenial, and unattractive 
people were the ones with whom Jesus ordi- 
narily associated. He was very unlike the 
philosophers and the rabbis and the dilet- 
tante reformers who demanded choice spirits 
for their associates in an enterprise before 
they would touch it. Christ asked only for 
willing souls. " Do you want to do any- 
thing for God and man?" "You may do 
much." " Come with Me." 

The world is saying some pointed and 
irritating things in our day about the lack 
of likeness to Christ among His professed 



114 THE LIVING CHRIST 



followers. The human touch is often lack- 
ing in them. They are afraid of the com- 
mon people. If they are asked to go out 
into the highways and hedges and compel 
the stragglers, the reprobates and degener- 
ates to come in, some of whom Christ saw 
were nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven than 
the respectably religious scribes or Phari- 
sees, there are disciples who would con- 
sider themselves very badly treated by such 
a request. 

There may not be any deep conscious 
hunger in the hearts of men for Christ, but 
they are quite sure that if the truth He 
taught could be caught up and embodied in 
the lives of even a small minority in the 
church, ideally "The society of those who 
love in the service of those who suffer," 
many perplexing questions would be an- 
swered and many distressing conditions 
would be changed. " Be ye imitators of 
Me, even as I also am of Christ. ,, There 
are those who see that this is what they 
might do, that it is what they must do if the 
highest possibilities of their soul are to be 
realized. To see that and then to hold back 
and hesitate is to make the great refusal. 



AIMS THAT END IN SELF 115 



"We all begin to die," says some one, 
" when we let go the chance to live our full- 
est life. When for reasons of timidity — 
cunning or covetousness — we hesitate to 
exchange all aims that end in self for the 
endless aims to which Christ calls us. 



IV 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTERDAY, 
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW 



HOUGH seething currents are visi- 



bly corroding all masses of matter 



in the eyes of men who see scien- 
tifically, whether gigantic boulders like the 
Matterhorn or colossal chains of mountains 
like the Alps and the Himalayas, yet the 
promise of permanent stability not only in 
colossal combinations of atoms but in hu- 
man institutions and organizations is seem- 
ingly so reliable that many men of fine in- 
tellectual fibre have always found it irre- 
sistible. The builders of those " mighty 
Pyramids of stone that, wedge like, cleave 
the desert air " were not more confident 
that they had perpetuated their names to 
the end of time than skillful artificers of 
astute systems have been that the founda- 
tions of their invisible edifices were laid so 
deep in the heart of things that even the 




THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTERDAY 117 



fingers of time would be unable to shake 
or loosen them. 

From the days of Augustine to Luther, 
men of piercing intelligence concentrated 
their energies on casting Christianity into a 
fixed and permanent form visible to all eyes 
and invincible to all attacks. For a thou- 
sand years ecclesiasts and theologians 
dreamed of combining the simplicities that 
are in Christ into an organization universal, 
but unified — by temporal power and eternal 
prerogatives. It was a dream rudely 
broken at the Reformation when this con- 
summate product of much toil, prayer and 
scheming — Ecclesiastics were trained to use 
each and all these with assiduity and astute- 
ness — split into halves, like a living sack-like 
cell, and proved by vigorous growth that it 
was still a vital organism, capable, if neces- 
sary, of repeating the process. 

All that Christ said about the Kingdom 
of Heaven — of which He said much more 
than about the Church — made it evident, 
except to eyes blinded by preconceptions, 
that He counted on life — " self-change to 
meet environment " — as the all-conquering, 
controlling and shaping energy of the com- 



118 THE LIVING CHRIST 



munity He had called out of the world. 
" The Kingdom of Heaven," He said, " is 
like " — not pyramids of stone or towering 
granite rocks, or any kind of masses of 
seeming immobility — these are all disin- 
tegrating while we write " Permanent " 
across the face of them, but " the King- 
dom of Heaven is like little living things 
that grow to be big things." It is like the 
mustard seed of which a child might hold a 
million in its hand, each a potential tree, in 
whose wide-spread branches great birds 
may find shelter. The Kingdom of Heaven 
is like the leaven, the yeast which the 
woman who is about to bake thrusts into 
the meal. Massive may be the measure of 
meal, and minute may be the leaven, but it 
immediately sets to work causing strange 
commotions and trepidations among all the 
millions of satisfied and somnolent atoms. 

Christ reckoned confidently on all changes 
inaugurated by the leaven He inserted into 
sodden humanity as advancing His purpose. 
The tree of life, "the life of God in the 
soul of man," is the reality of the ideal tree 
Ygdrasil of our Scandinavian ancestors, 
whose roots were wrapped round the heart 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTERDAY 119 



of the universe and whose growth was reg- 
istered like that of common trees by clearly 
defined rings, each an infallible record of 
progress marking a stage and epoch of vital 
expansion. Following on the primitive era 
of the establishment of the Kingdom came 
an intoxicating era of conquest when the 
secular sword was held and swung by a 
supposedly spiritual hand. The long night 
of this era, lighted in every century by the 
lurid fires of victories far more dangerous 
to the Kingdom of Heaven than defeat, 
ended in an epoch of revolution and ref- 
ormation, the forerunner, men feared, or 
hoped, of an era of dissolution. This latter 
epoch resulted, as was inevitable, in a 
realignment of forces and in a withdrawal 
from salients thrust too far into the enemy's 
territory to be permanently defended. 

This strategic movement in the century 
that closed nearly two decades ago danger- 
ously resembled at times a disorderly re- 
treat in which many things of incomparable 
value are unnecessarily thrown away. 

Toward the close of the last century so 
many theories, traditions and systems had 
to be sacrificed that multitudes became 



120 THE LIVING CHRIST 



nervous and frightened. They lost their 
heads, like the timid householder who, hear- 
ing a burglar in the entrance hall, rushed 
to the top of the stairs, and flung down the 
silver basket with its contents, crying in a 
trembling voice : " There it is, it is all I 
have. Take it and go." Many of the laity, 
and not a few of the clergy, like Robert Els- 
mere — but unlike him, not altogether im- 
aginary persons — surrendered all they had 
before they were even called upon to stand 
and deliver. " A large part of the work of 
the twentieth century,"it has been said,"will 
be to take out of the waste-paper basket 
what the nineteenth century with inconsid- 
erate precipitation threw away." This cen- 
tury has already returned many a silver 
basket, with its contents, to the rightful, 
though timid and unheroic owners. 

The twentieth century has recovered 
whole pages of history that were thrown 
out and flung away as unauthentic and un- 
reliable. The period of the Roman kings 
disappeared from Roman history and the 
works of Herodotus from Greek history. 
The " father of history " was rechristened 
the " father of lies." Hebrew history shared 



THE CHEISTIANITY OF YESTERDAY 121 



the same fate as that of the Roman and 
the Greek. "There was no Moses," the 
critics said, " but we will do the best we can 
to compensate you for losing him by giving 
you a half-dozen Isaiahs." All the evan- 
gelists, the biographers of Jesus, were 
treated with the same scant courtesy. " If 
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John claimed 
to be of the first century, then they must go, 
with Herodotus and Moses, into the bottom 
of the basket. Or better still, we will keep 
the manuscripts as parchments on which to 
write our critical theories of real and perma- 
nent value." 

The twentieth century has reverently 
removed many things from the receptacle 
of odds and ends. It has taken out the 
Roman kings from the scraps and put them 
back in the epoch to which they belonged. 
It has replaced Herddotus among the great 
historians, and given him a prominent posi- 
tion on Dr. Eliot's five-foot shelf of im- 
mortals. It has returned the gospels and 
the epistles to the first century. 

The nineteenth century made an even 
greater mistake in banishing the Creator to 
unapproachable regions of time and thought 



122 THE LIVING CHEIST 



and space. It imprisoned Him in impossi- 
ble conditions. " Our scientific and philo- 
sophical theories," they said, " have taken 
away your God, and to the end of time He 
will never again be recovered." The twen- 
tieth century pays no heed to such a boast. 
It sees God everywhere, " Every common 
bush is aflame with God." " It finds writ 
down for very A-B-C of fact:" " In the 
beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth." It will not speak of the nineteenth 
century's favorite hypothesis merely as 
" evolution " for fear some might think this 
a blind, mechanical, and impersonal force. 
It now talks of " Creative evolution," and 
sees the Creator at work within it as Christ 
saw Him working in all living, moving 
things. Professor Henri Bergson, the idol 
of the philosophical world of the twentieth 
century, as Herbert Spencer was of the 
nineteenth, the " master of those who 
know " and the teacher of our own Pro- 
fessor William James, sees an inspiring 
vision of progress toward an end where the 
nineteenth century philosopher too often 
saw only an unending and undirected circu- 
lating movement. 



THE CHKISTIANITY OF YESTEKDAY 123 



" All the living hold together, and all yield to 
the same tremendous push. The animal takes its 
stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and 
the whole of humanity in space and time is an 
immense army galloping beside, before, and be- 
hind each of us, in an overwhelming charge, able 
to beat down every resistance and clear the most 
formidable obstacles, perhaps even death." 

Examining the sketch of a pupil in 
a studio, it is said that Michelangelo 
silently wrote upon the canvas the single 
word " Amplior/ 3 larger. So the twentieth 
century silently writes over all the sketches 
and systems and philosophies of the nine- 
teenth, " Amplior " — as Christ wrote over 
the righteousness of the scribes and Phari- 
sees not " less " but " more." 

These leaders of the Hebrew people had 
gone far, but they had not gone far enough. 
" Except your righteousness exceed that 
of all others," Christ says, " you come 
short." The Christian of the twentieth 
century is compelled to be not only abreast, 
but ahead of the times. He is to be 
thoroughly furnished — more thoroughly 
than the man of the past. If he claims to be 
God's modern man he must prove his claim 



124 THE LIVING CHEIST 



by being more of a man than Mammon's 
man, or than any other man. He must be 
larger and better in his business and profes- 
sion, in his public, social, and private life. 
He must be a better athlete and student, as 
well as a better father, son, and citizen, 
because of his loftier ideals. 

" The More " is in modern philosophical 
terminology the equivalent of the Godlike, 
" The power not ourselves that makes for 
righteousness " of Matthew Arnold. Those 
who commit themselves to this " More " rise 
as on wings. They have higher standards 
and nobler purposes than the scribes and 
Pharisees of our modern world. " The dif- 
ference," it is said, " is like that between 
the weathercock and the mariner's compass; 
one has E, W, N, S, the other not only four 
points, but thirty-two. The worldly con- 
science weighs as freight-scales weigh, the 
Christian conscience weights like jewelers' 
scales." The Christian conscience is sensi- 
tive concerning all outward relations; they 
are to be more exact, adequate, beneficent, 
brotherly, and scientific than the world's 
coarser standards call for. The Christian's 
motives are to be finer, his character more 



THE CHRISTIANITY OP YESTERDAY 125 



crystalline and CHristlike. "A good Bud- 
dhist is as good as a good Christian," said 
an American naval officer. It might be 
true. A man with a candle might use as 
much light as a man with an electric lamp, 
but this is not to say that candle-light is as 
good as electricity. Your righteousness, 
Christian of the twentieth century, is to ex- 
ceed the righteousness of all the scribes and 
Pharisees, the philosophers and the dis- 
ciples of the past, because your light, as 
compared to theirs, is as electric bulbs to 
sputtering candles. 

The twentieth-century Christian is to find 
more meaning than the Christians of the 
past found in the three great facts of Revela- 
tion, Regeneration, and Reconciliation. 

Revelation was once restricted, like grace, 
to the Church and to the book of the 
Church, the Bible. The twentieth century 
goes back and stands with David under the 
stars, and hears the heavens declare the 
glory of God, though without speech or lan- 
guage their voice is not unheard. The 
twentieth century understands in its larger 
import what the writer of Hebrews meant 
when he said, " God who in sundry times 



126 THE LIVING CHRIST 



and in divers manners spake in time past 
unto the fathers." 

The twentieth-century Christian stands 
with Paul as it hears him say : " There are, 
it may be, so many kinds of voices in the 
world and none of them is without signi- 
fication," and knows that if the receiver of 
the mind and heart is correctly tuned, each 
one of these voices will bring its individual 
revelation. The twentieth century hears 
God's voice in truth' of every kind, scientific, 
philosophical, ethical, and v religious. The 
only question asked in mediaeval times about 
any particular statement was " Is it au- 
thorized, approved by popes and councils? ** 
In the last half of the nineteenth century 
the one question put to any theory, new 
or old, was: "Is it scientific? Have the 
scribes and Pharisees of the scientific world 
endorsed it? Can it be explained in har- 
mony with Evolution? If not, away with 
it!" 

Authority has become antiquated. The 
Church, the party, the system, do not make 
a thing true merely by stamping it — as the 
government may make a piece of worthless 
paper a dollar by the stroke of a machine. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTEKDAY 127 



Science is no more infallible than authority. 
Science has often been a stalking horse for 
unscientific hypotheses. Systems have been 
forced down unwilling throats with the cry : 
" It is scientific." 

Truth is sublime, eternal, absolute reality, 
whether ecclesiastical, theological, scientific, 
or philosophical. Truth is not a mere 
quality that comes and goes, like the sharp- 
ness of a scalpel. It is not a matter of per- 
sonal feeling, keen to me and dull to you; 
it is the stuff of which the universe is com- 
pounded. Absolute truth becomes true by 
no experience, but was just as true before 
we were born as it is now. Truth is a ray 
emitted from the soul of God, from that 
eternal " love that wills the blessedness of 
others," from the " living will that shall 
endure when all that seems shall suffer 
shock." 

The twentieth-century Christian is keen 
for truth. " Give me the truth," he cries, 
" or I die. Show me the truth anywhere 
and I must die rather than deny it or barter 
it away. 'Tis man's perdition to be safe 
when for the truth he ought to die." The 
twentieth-century Christian floats in a sea* 



128 THE LIVING CHRIST 



of truth ; it is the ether of his soul, it pene- 
trates the core of his being. 

" The truth in God's breast 
Is trace for trace upon ours imprest, 
Though He is so bright and we are so dim, 
We are made in His image to witness Him." 

Truth frees man, from the shackles 
of ecclesiastical and scientific systems. It 
focuses his powers upon one point until that 
point bursts into a revealing flame like the 
burning bush. " There are truths such that 
to deny them is simply to reassert them un- 
der a new form," says Professor Royce. 
" The twentieth century," he goes on to say, 
" finds such truths in mathematics, in logic, 
in philosophy, and most of all in religion, in 
the reaction of the whole spirit, in the pres- 
ence of an experience of the highest realities 
of human life and of the universe." " It 
was worth while to go through this experi- 
ence," said a Christian after a dangerous 
operation, " for now I know that there is a 
peace that passeth understanding." It is 
worth while to go through anything that 
brings the peace which comes from har- 
mony with the " Great order of things " and 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTERDAY 129 



with the Orderer. " You shall know the 
truth, and the truth shall make you free " is 
the revelation in which the twentieth cen- 
tury believes. 

Redemption was as unpopular a word in 
the nineteenth century as revelation. It 
was as unwelcome in fashionable and cul- 
tured society as a poor relation in old-fash- 
ioned garments at an aristocratic reception. 
All old fashions seem preposterous. " Man 
does not need redemption," said the nine- 
teenth century, " he needs instruction." 
" Give him light and he will turn away from 
darkness." He will redeem himself from 
error. A redeemer is inconceivable if re- 
demption is superfluous. Is Christianity a 
religion of redemption or a religion of emo- 
tion, excited by lofty ideals such as start up 
before us in the parables and the Sermon on 
the Mount? That question has been an- 
swered in a remarkable way by one of the 
ablest of the New England philosophers. 
Brought up under influences which might 
have been expected to make such an answer 
as he has given altogether impossible, Pro- 
fessor Royce wrote in an essay on " What is 
Vital in Christianity "— 



130 THE LIVING CHEIST 



" What is most vital to Christianity is con- 
tained in whatever is essential and permanent 
about the doctrines of the incarnation and the 
atonement. I assert that this so-called purely 
primitive Christianity is not so vital, is not so 
central, is not so essential to mature Christianity 
as are the doctrines of the incarnation and atone- 
ment when these are rightly interpreted. . . . 
God Himself endures evil and triumphs over it, 
and lifts it out of itself, and wins it over to the 
service of good." 

Regeneration is not merely a Christian 
theory, it is a dynamic experience. It is as 
real a part of the spiritual world as is trans- 
formation of the physical world. Matter 
everywhere sags, slumps, falls to the lowest 
possible level. Life seizes on it, lifts it up 
in the flower, in the tree, in the man — works 
a miracle before our admiring eyes. A 
thing of beauty tells the success that life has 
won at a given moment of its evolution. 
" Beauty is a sign language which inter- 
preted reads Made in Heaven." Every man 
who was once a dead weight, a mere mass 
of matter to be carried carefully in the home 
and the Church, yet in spite of everything 
slipping perpetually to the lowest level of 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTERDAY 131 

self-indulgence, uselessness, parasitism, who 
comes under the sway of a force reaching 
down from above and lifting him out of his 
old time degradations is as undeniable an 
evidence of regeneration as the seed lifted 
out of the sand or mud into a flower is of 
transformation. Professor James writes a 
large volume called " Varieties of Relig- 
ious Experience," in which he gives many- 
such instances of which he has heard or 
which he has seen; and Mr. Harold Begbie 
in a similar work shows us " Twice-born 
Men " before, during or after regeneration. 
These are indubitable facts against which 
no more can be said than the skeptics of 
Christ's time were able to say when they 
saw the men leaping and running who, a 
little while before, were lame beggars at the 
gate of the temple. 

The nineteenth century sang as one of its 
favorite songs of redemption, " Throw out 
the Hfe-line, somebody is sinking to-day." 
The twentieth century speaks less of a life- 
line than of Life. " Open your eyes, see, 
here is the Christ who Himself declares that 
He came that the world might have life, and 
might have it more abundantly." Life is 



132 THE LIVING CHEIST 



the world's greatest need — what some one 
calls " the spiritual life of God focalized in 
a human personality." This is the energy 
that lifts up man as plants and trees are 
lifted up, by an all penetrating and elevat- 
ing power. Deliverance from impersonal 
force — from fire and floods, from disease 
and death — must be personal. Man looks 
for deliverance from sin to a sinless Son of 
Man. " Life sufficient, and it may be ef- 
ficient, for every human being to the end 
of time is in Him. This life, available and 
adequate, is at one and the same instance 
the vindication of God and of the universe." 

Reconciliation, like redemption and reve- 
lation, was given the cold shoulder in the 
century that ended nearly two decades ago. 
The last century emphasized origins; the 
present century emphasizes destinies. The 
nineteenth century emphasized rights, the 
twentieth emphasizes duties. The nine- 
teenth century thought it was under no 
obligation to save the world — at least many 
of the scientists said so — " that is the busi- 
ness of evolution 99 ; but the twentieth cen- 
tury understands that man is still his 
brother's keeper; that extremes must meet 



THE CHEIST1ANITT OP YESTERDAY 133 



and the pressure of Christian hands will do 
something in bringing them closer together. 
The rich and the poor, the wise and the 
ignorant, the top and the bottom of society, 
and those who stand at the utmost extremi- 
ties of the east and the west and the north 
and the south must be constrained by the 
love of Christ into one family. Reconcilia- 
tion of God with man, and of man with God, 
with himself, and with his environment was 
the problem of the last century; reconcilia- 
tion with his fellow-man is the problem of 
this century. Every Christian knows the 
joy of the other reconciliations, but few can 
speak from experience of the joy which 
comes from the reconciliation of all human 
relations. 

Solidarity, confederation, alliance, are 
favorite words of the present day. This is 
a century that makes much of missionary 
societies, of Laymen's organizations, of Men 
and Religion Movements. It takes seri- 
ously the poetical suggestion of the nine- 
teenth century about a " Parliament of Man 
a Federation of the World/' " One man is 
no man." Man finds himself only in rela- 
tion to his fellow-men. He cannot safely 



134 THE LIVING CHBIST 



alienate and isolate himself from the rest of 
humanity. His newspapers, his magazines, 
his books, throb with the sense of obliga- 
tion, of duty, of the necessity for recon- 
ciliation and social service. 

The philosopher says : " If one appears 
in the outer form of man, but shows no sense 
as yet of having any personal ideal or pur- 
pose or individual will at all, we call him a 
person by courtesy — but a fool in fact." 
The people are one with the philosophers. 
They demand that wealth shall be consid- 
ered a trust and used beneficently; that all 
privileges of every sort shall be looked upon, 
not as personal prerogatives, but as a stew- 
ardship. The man who denies this is living 
not in the twentieth century A. D., but in the 
second century B. c. He is a pagan Greek. 
He escapes the stings of outraged conscience 
by conforming to the conventionalities. 
His righteousness is merely that of the 
scribes, the Pharisees and the Philistines of 
his own set. Such men are like pleasure- 
boats in a land-locked bay, tacking here and 
there, satisfied in their limitations till a day 
comes when an ocean-going vessel sails 
slowly into sight through an opening of 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTEEDAY 135 



which they were ignorant. Battered by 
storms and gales, but in her size and dignity 
and, most of all, in her cargo, the newcomer 
shows her superiority to the pleasure craft 
which, by comparison, shrivel in the shame 
of pettiness and selfishness. So even now 
the dainty liver, the pagan pleasure lover, 
content in his little pond, where the lotus 
blooms, may feel small when he sees what 
treasures others bring from venturesome 
voyages ; what utilities they conserve ; what 
heroisms they exhibit. How can I in such 
an atmosphere, electric with great thoughts 
that shock and stab the mind awake, intoxi- 
catingly dream pipe dreams and forever go 
round and round in the land-locked bay of 
egotism, while God and my conscience, my 
Master and my fellow-man alike cry for 
help, and an open sea of shoreless possibili- 
ties calls me with trumpet tongues? 

To be alive in the twentieth century is to 
be within the reach of possibilities which 
only angels have looked into. To be young 
in such a century should be an irresistible 
inspiration. 

It is useless to deny that there are men 
who dislike the Christianity of to-day, as 



136 THE LIVING CHEIST 



well as that of yesterday, and shun its in- 
fluence. They are as afraid of entering a 
church as many Christians once were of go- 
ing to a theatre. They are not necessarily 
antagonistic to Christ or to Christian 
virtues, but they have been alienated from 
so-called Christianity by misrepresentations 
and misinterpretations. They have been 
taught to think of Christianity as consisting 
in an organization, a Church, and there have 
been times and places in which the Church 
was not attractive, times when the Church 
was merely baptized peculiarism or milita- 
rism, times when the Church committed 
crimes not unlike those which make us 
shudder to-day. The Church fulminated 
and thundered, excommunicated and tor- 
tured. The Church was Prussianized 
Christianity — who could love it? 

Once more the Church has a great op- 
portunity. In England it has been sorrow- 
fully said that she has not been wide awake, 
that she has failed to connect; in the ver- 
nacular of London, she has " missed the 
bus." She has been so engrossed with 
false issues, with abstractions and technicali- 
ties that she has let her chance slip. The 



THE CHKISTIANITY OF YESTEEDAY 137 



Anglican Church, it is asserted, suggests 
academic, not applied, Christianity, to mil- 
lions of would-be religious Englishmen. 
This may have been true in the first years 
of the war if not now. All phases of the 
Church in America are having the same op- 
portunity, and they run the same danger of 
letting " The day " go by. 

Some, too, dislike Christianity because 
they have thought of it merely as a system 
of doctrine. A man is either orthodox or 
heterodox without reference to a Satanic or 
Christlike life. "What is your creed?" is 
the question, with no reference to conduct 
or character. Donald Hankey, in his 
" Student in Arms," says: "The soldier 
thinks of Christianity as consisting in be- 
lieving the Bible, and setting up to be better 
than your neighbors." " By believing the 
Bible he means believing that Jonah was 
swallowed by the whale." By being better 
than your neighbor he means " not drink- 
ing, not swearing, and preferably not smok- 
ing, being close-fisted with your money, 
avoiding the companionship of doubtful 
characters, and refusing to acknowledge 
that such have any claim upon you." Who 



138 



THE LIVING CHEIST 



is responsible for this caricature? Christ 
was not and the Apostles were not. 

Only a small proportion of our soldiers 
and sailors in Europe will be impressed by 
Churches, Cathedrals, Monasteries, and 
Convents, to which perhaps they will lift 
their eyes incidentally as they march by. 
But they will inevitably be impressed by 
hospitals, the odor of whose anaesthetics is 
sweeter to the nostrils of the man who is 
suffering pain than the attar of roses. They 
will be impressed by scores of nurses with 
the red cross on their arms, the symbol of 
a Christianity red with the blood of self- 
sacrifice; and by doctors and ambulance 
drivers, working fearlessly in a storm of 
shells; and by helpers who give hot coffee 
as the troops march out into the cold night, 
or into the wet trenches, or " over the top/' 
across no-man's land. These are agreeable, 
admirable " applications " which find their 
source only in Christianity. They will be 
not less impressed by the huts of the Y. M. 
C. A., with their irresistible appeal to the 
whole man — to his soul through his senses. 
This is not academic, but applied Christi- 
anity. The soldier who rubs up against it 



THE CHRISTIANITY OP YESTERDAY 139 



can scarcely fail to carry away a permanent 
impression, that will prevent him forever 
from sneering at a religion whose results 
are so self-evidently desirable. 

Here at home, in the camps and canton- 
ments, in the unaccustomed, unnatural and 
unreal life of an intermediate state, men are 
bewildered and dazed with new emotions 
and strange anticipations. If they find in 
every city churches and homes open, where 
they are welcomed as sons of old friends, as 
defenders of their country's flag and of the 
world's altar of liberty and morality, the ap- 
peal to them then will not be made by 
academic theories which do not interest 
them, but they will be brought face to face 
with the facts of a vital up-to-date beneficent 
energy. It was after such an experience 
that one of our soldiers said, " This is the 
best illustration of applied Christianity that 
has ever been applied to me." 

The Christian who is to apply this Chris- 
tianity cannot be one who relies merely on 
an ecclesiastic relationship, or on intellectual 
assent to theological systems. He is not one 
who has merely been successful in " casting 
anchors to windward," making himself as 



140 THE LIVING CHEIST 



he thinks secure in a safe place; but he is 
one who has himself been delivered from the 
devils of appetite, passion, lust and selfish- 
ness, one who has been set squarely on his 
feet by some Christ-strengthened hand. 
He is one who not only " walks and leaps 
and praises God," because his own ankle 
bones have been stiffened, but who extends 
a strong, warm, helping Christian hand to 
all who are " down and out," and to those 
who tremble on the brink of helplessness 
and despair. 

To bring Christianity down out of the air, 
to show the dull-eyed world that it is not 
ethereal, not academic or theoretic or even 
theological, that it is something to be felt 
like the touch of a warm hand, something 
to be seen like a man who was dead like 
Lazarus a little while ago, and is now mov- 
ing with a vital touch in this great world, is 
the inspiring mission to which every Chris- 
tian is called. 

Even such Christians are not sent out 
into the world to create power, but to apply 
it. Through them the transforming power 
of Christ is to give sight to blind beggars 
and healing to lame men lying helpless be- 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTERDAY 141 



fore the beautiful gates of life. All this 
may seem to some remote. Christ no longer 
walks the earth. Men cannot touch Him 
and see Him as they once did. But His 
touch, like His truth, " has still its ancient 
power." The touch on which we rely is 
not a physical contact, dependent on near- 
ness and propinquity. 

" The healing of His seamless dress 
Is by our beds of pain, 
We touch Him in life's throng and press, 
And we are whole again." 

The world is in despair with its moral 
defectives, its spiritual derelicts. It has no 
hope to offer to either cripples or criminals. 
It gladly tumbles them into the bottomless 
pit, with a satisfactory feeling of good 
riddance. Philosophy tries to explain the 
causes to which criminality is due. Philan- 
thropy tries to palliate crimes and cure com- 
plaints with sugar-coated pills. But neither 
philosophy nor philanthropy has any hope 
of restoration for the radically wrong. " It 
is only the religion of Christ that is not in 
despair about this mass of profitless evil, 
dragging at the heels of progress — the re- 



142 THE LIYING OHEIST 



ligion," as Mr. Begbie says, " that still be- 
lieves in miracles " — the ever recurring 
miracle of making bad men good. 

That is the miracle that amazed even 
Paul in Corinth. He was not at all im- 
pressed by the gigantic rock— the Acro- 
Corinthus in the center of the city, from 
whose top there was a famous and splendid 
view of Athens and its temples. Paul makes 
no allusion to these marvels of nature and 
art but he has much to say about the moral 
miracles that in his eyes were far more im- 
pressive. He had many associations in 
Corinth with average citizens, but they were 
the heathen of the historian and the satirist, 
whose secret life has been revealed in the 
long hidden frescoes of Pompeii. Paul 
makes, as we should expect, no attempt to 
whitewash his friends. He speaks frankly 
of what they were, without any fear of hurt- 
ing their feelings. " Such," he says, " were 
some of you," as he runs over a list of crimes 
of which we hear ordinarily only in the 
police courts. Now they were active work- 
ers in the Corinthian Church. The change 
was not due merely to his preaching, Paul 
confesses, but to Christ's power. This he 



THE CHBISTIANITY OF YESTEEDAY 143 



acknowledged, in coming to Corinth, was to 
be his reliance. " I determined not to know 
anything among you save Jesus Christ and 
Him crucified." He preaches a Saviour 
visibly slain, whose salvation is unmistak- 
ably demonstrated in the lives of hundreds 
of Corinthians. 

Applied Christianity is always visible. 
" It is the incarnation brought down to 
date." " It is the Gospel in boots." " Facts 
are the words of God," some one says. God 
is still speaking, therefore, for facts are ac- 
cumulating. Whenever the helping hand is 
extended there is life in its touch. Every 
soul with Christlike sympathy, benevolence, 
love, possesses this power. 

The conditions controlling the transmis- 
sion of such energy are exacting and un- 
changeable. As a very small clot in the 
brain is enough to stop the currents of 
thought even in the mind of a Shakespeare, 
so a small obstacle, a petty hindrance, a 
sense of self-sufficiency, a confidence of 
superiority, exclusive absorption in plans 
for personal aggrandizement, may one and 
all break the current of Christ's saving 
power as quickly and as completely as a 



144 



THE LIVING CHEIST 



crime or a vice. These soul clots are non- 
conductors. Hands separated by them from 
the currents of divine energy are helpless 
and impotent. 

The inspiration of those who attempt to 
apply Christianity is found in the inevitable 
conviction that saving results will always 
follow the contact of a Christlike life. That 
any particular group of men without refer- 
ence to conduct or character should be 
channels of divine grace, that either Popes, 
Bishops or Presbyters, without reference to 
the lives they are living should be able to 
impart spiritual gifts tactually is quite open 
to question. Such a statement takes its 
place under the classifications of mediaeval- 
ism. It may be so or it may not be so, but 
the results to the common eye are not con- 
vincing. No apparent change may follow 
the impact of the ecclesiastical hand; but 
the whole subject ceases to be academic, 
and becomes altogether practical as we 
watch certain groups moving in the world 
with Christ's spirit of fairness, kindness and 
helpfulness. Skepticism cannot live on a 
diet composed exclusively of the fruits of 
the Spirit. 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTERDAY 145 



The boy with a Christian father who is to 
him like a big brother ; the girl with a Chris- 
tian, sisterlike mother; the scholar with a 
Christian tutor, or teacher who is also a 
comrade and friend as much interested in 
his character as in his scholarship — one and 
all find that Christianity is being applied to 
them in an irresistible way. The deluded 
victims of the world's false promises warmed 
back to life by Christian forgiveness and 
love are speechless, but convinced. Each 
of these is sure of what has happened in the 
secrets of the soul. The Christianity of the 
future, like the Christianity of the Apostles, 
will rely for its victories on human sym- 
pathy, on brotherly kindness and helpful- 
ness, on the love which endures all things as 
well as on the faith that removes mountains. 
It will win its most striking and convincing 
victories in the most hopeless circumstances. 

Christ's conquests have always been made 
with a motley army, compared with which 
Washington's soldiers at Valley Forge were 
picked troops. Christ called into the ranks 
the submerged tenth — the physical and 
moral defectives. He spoke to paralytics — 
prone on a wadded blanket that serves in 



146 THE LIVING CHEIST 



the East as a couch, and the palsied man 
took up his bed and marched away holding 
it aloft as a banner of victory. Christ spoke 
to men like Zaccheus, bedridden in the help- 
lessness of greed and graft, and to women 
like the Mary, who anointed His feet with 
tears of gratitude that He had so cleansed 
and strengthened her that she could rise out 
of the deep mire into which she had slipped. 
In that army He made officers of men like 
Peter, tossing, when He first found him, on 
his couch of vacillation, timidity and cow- 
ardice; and like Paul, who, when Christ 
called him, was prone on his pride, from 
which it was impossible for him to rise for 
any service for humanity. 

This is the " noble army " that marches 
across the world. Each soldier carrying the 
symbol of some former weakness, now 
changed into a symbol of strength. All 
who listen may hear the voice saying to 
them : "Arise, take up thy bed and go." 
The natural thing to do with beds is to lie 
down on them. Every day makes it more 
difficult to rise. Muscles relax, powers 
shrivel and become atrophied. Disinclina- 
tion to exertion doubles. " We can do 



THE CHRISTIANITY OF YESTERDAY 147 



nothing," these recumbent souls mutter to 
themselves; "all our efforts would but 
make bad worse." But weakness, defects, 
limitations, all look differently when we 
bring them to Christ, as the four men 
brought their paralyzed friend. 

Many are deaf to the voice that calls them 
into this noble army, marchng under the 
strange banners. They are spiritually 
inert, supine, stolid. They lie helpless. 
They confess they have done nothing what- 
ever for humanity, that they cannot lift a 
pound of the burdens beneath which the 
world staggers. Multitudes are helpless 
because of physical limitations. They were 
" never very strong," they say, " never since 
we were children can we remember the time 
when we were altogether free from pain. 
We have always had a sense of exhaustion, 
of being tired." Paul may have had some 
such limitation as this. " His bodily pres- 
ence is weak," members of his Corinthian 
congregation had said of him. Just what 
they meant may be uncertain, but it is be- 
yond peradventure that many, whose bodily 
presence was indeed weak, men like Robert 
Hall, who never preached without passing 



148 THE LIVING CHEIST 



hours afterward rolling in torture on the 
floor — and Frederick W. Robertson, of 
Brighton, who in all his short life probably 
never knew what health was — preached 
and prayed like their Master on the Cross, 
and, like Him, won strange converts. 

Every church has its housetop saints, 
who know how to sing, even when suffer- 
ing. In Philadelphia a young woman had 
dreamed of being a teacher and in the end 
the principal of a young ladies' seminary, 
but she was partially paralyzed before she 
was twenty. " This ends her dream," her 
friends said. They were mistaken. It was 
true she never walked again, but she built 
up one of the most successful schools in 
Pennsylvania. All the activities of the 
seminary were carried on from her couch. 
Thoughtless girls came from her room in 
tears — not of anger, but of tenderness and 
hope. No one ever spent a half hour with 
her without a firmer grasp on life's realities. 
She was one who had the right to sing: 

" My cage confines me round, 
Abroad I cannot fly; 
But though my wing is closely Hound 



THE CHRISTIANITY OP YESTERDAY 149 



My heart's at liberty. 

My prison walls cannot control 

The flight, the freedom of my soul." 

Her couch, the symbol of weakness, be- 
came, like the bed of the paralytic, a symbol 
of strength. The Christianity of to-morrow 
will lay much stress on such symbols as the 
outward signs of an inward grace. 

Another claims exemption from enlist- 
ment or draft in the army of helpfulness be- 
cause of intellectual deficiency. While we 
stoutly assert in our Constitution that " all 
men are born free and equal," we very 
wisely do the best we can to turn the as- 
sertion into a fact by educating the children 
in our public schools. No two children, 
even in the same home, have the same qual- 
ity of brain fibre. Poets, orators and 
painters are born, not made. The world is 
full of round pegs in square holes, but it is 
not always easy for even the wise onlooker 
to see just what the shape of any particular 
hole or peg may be. Bishop Brooks and 
Dean Stanley were both told, before they 
began their ministry, that they could never 
preach successfully, and Paul, after years 



150 THE LIVING CHRIST 



of experience, seems to have been bluntly 
informed of very much the same thing. 
" His speech," they said, " is contemptible." 

Dull scholars often wake up unexpectedly. 
Men like General Grant, who have had diffi- 
culty in graduation, have later on startled 
the world with genius. A great occasion, 
or a great motive, may act like an electric 
shock. Men who have been thought par- 
alyzed have been known not only to walk, 
but to run, on hearing the cry of " Fire ! " 
Dull wit may flash and glow in the flame 
which love lights. Powers, undreamed of, 
await only the galvanic discharge of con- 
centrated feeling. 

Temperamental peculiarities have also 
been made reasons for exemption from 
service as a soldier of Christ Such pe- 
culiarities may be either inherited or ac- 
quired. Children are born with tendencies 
both physical and moral. Parents, by their 
example, may unconsciously encourage 
their children in every evil way. For en- 
vironment of this sort, due allowance must 
be made. But it is undeniable that from 
the same home children may go out to lead 
very different lives. Because the father or 



THE CHEISTIANITY OF YESTEEDAY 151 



mother are saints it does not follow that 
their children will all be saintly. Neither is 
it true that the children of cross-grained, 
cantankerous and dissipated parents inevi- 
tably follow in their footsteps. All the con- 
verts in our rescue missions — all the John 
B. Goughs, the Jerry McCauleys, the Tod 
Halls, the Wm. A. Sundays — are indisput- 
able proofs that men may come up like lilies 
out of the mud, and that the chains in which 
they have been enslaved may be broken. 
Their weaknesses may become waving 
banners of triumph. " I glory in my in- 
firmities," says the apostle. " Whatever I 
have been, is now an added proof of Christ's 
power to deliver and remake men." 

Blessings easily become unendurable bur- 
dens. There is an anodyne in prosperity. 
" Few," it is said, " are carried to the skies 
on flowery beds of ease." The perfume of 
the flowers of such beds may destroy all 
desire, except for earth. Whatever may be 
one's temperamental peculiarities, however 
self-distrustful or self-assertive one may be, 
however volatile or sullen, however insin- 
cere or brusquely indifferent to the feelings 
of others, each and all these deficiencies 



152 THE LIVING CHEIST 



may become a document which may be put 
in evidence to prove that the Son of Man 
hath power to forgive and to overcome sins. 

When the Agnostic, as he calls himself, 
sees a man " take up his bed and walk," 
changed from an economic hindrance or 
moral stumbling stone to a physical force 
and a spiritual splendor, he wonders, envies, 
worships and says, it may be : " Thy God 
shall be my God." The man who has noth- 
ing but contempt for the weaknesses of 
humanity will feel new respect for his fel- 
low-men and himself as he sees the one- 
time defective stride past, carrying his bur- 
den. 

It may stir the responsive heart to read 
of Christ bearing poverty, the misapprehen- 
sion of friends, and the scorn of enemies, 
enduring mockery and torture, the thrust 
of the spear and the blow of the hammer 
on the nails piercing the flesh — but all this 
happened so long ago that to many minds it 
is unreal and remote. But if men to-day 
can carry their burdens in a Christly way, 
and drink as unmurmuringly as He, of the 
cup pressed to their lips, they will win at- 
tention, first to themselves, and then to 



THE CHEISTIANITY OF YESTEEDAY 153 



Him, and they will have not only the joy 
which comes from freedom and strength, 
but the delight, not less satisfying, born of 
the gratitude of those who have learned 
from them that they, too, may rise and take 
up their load and walk erect, like children 
of the King. 

The Christianity of to-morrow will be the 
Christianity of those apostolic yesterdays 
when bad men were made good and good 
men were made better. It will place the 
emphasis not on an institution, creed or 
ritual, but on a changed life. The world 
has information enough but it is sorely in 
need of inspiration. 

" Whom do you count the worst man upon earth ? 
Be sure he knows in his conscience more 
Of what right is than arrives at birth 
In the best man's acts that we bow before. 
This last knows better — true but my fact is 
'Tis one thing to know and another to practice. 
And thence I conclude that the real God- 
function 

Is to furnish a motive and injunction 
For practising what we know already." 

Does the precept run " Believe in good 
In justice truth now understood 



154 THE LIVING CHEIST 



For the first time ? " — or " Believe in Me 
Who lived and died, yet essentially 
Am Lord of Life?" 

On the arch of the sky " see the Christ 
stand " beckoning us toward the triumphant 
Christianity of endless to-morrows. 



V 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN OUR 
MODERN WORLD 

f^O find a fitting place for Christ in 



the modern world is confessedly 



one of the most perplexing prob- 
lems of our day. " Christ," men say, " is 
undeniable, unavoidable and inexplicable. 
He is tantalizing, illusive and irritating — 
but He is essential." They utter the last 
word about Him. They pass the final sen- 
tence upon Him. They go on their way re- 
joicing. The strange episode of the Divine 
Man is closed! Then suddenly they see 
that the whole question must be reopened. 
Certain unnoticed points were not covered. 
The labor of love or of hate is lost. All 
must be done over again. 

The autocrats of the world of literature 
and criticism "tell the whole truth," they 
assert, about Jesus Christ, but as they write 
" Finis " to the last chapter, they hear the 




155 



156 THE LIVING CHRIST 



mocking laughter of other autocrats and 
hyper-critics or super-critics over the super- 
ficiality and absurdity of their raw and in- 
digestible solutions of the problem. The 
masters of those who know announce 
in stately and faultless style the conclusion 
of the high court of intellectual immortals, 
only to feel compelled by an irresistible im- 
pulse to return that they may add a post- 
script to their theses or to put the finishing 
touches to a picture, which is convincing to 
no one. 

This dissatisfaction of the secularists and 
of all the specialists who will not hear of 
any but an altogether human Christ is an 
open secret. Theirs is a disappointment 
which will inevitably be shared by every 
young or old " mariner " who " launches his 
vessel and crowds his canvas, following the 
gleam " which he deludedly hopes will lead 
him to some island peak, from which he can 
look across the waves and see that from 
bright horizon to bright horizon no such 
strange barque, half of the sea and half of 
the air, half of earth and half of heaven, as 
that christened with Christ's name, is any- 
where visible. 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST 157 



Such a peak has not been and never will 
be discovered, is the opinion of Professor 
Goldwin Smith, a veteran voyager, who 
spent many moons in following the decep- 
tive gleam. He says — perhaps in the tone 
of a Balaam, uttering a reluctant blessing 
on Israel : " In Christ there are not only 
some excellences in a superlative degree, 
but human nature has in His character its 
final and absolute completeness, so that the 
moral efforts of all the ages to the end of 
the world can only be efforts to realize the 
character which Christ's life represents." 
John Stuart Mill, whose father turned his 
face while still a boy away from Christ, 
looked back in mature life and blurted out 
his conviction : " Not even now would it be 
easy for an unbeliever to find a better trans- 
lation of the rule of virtue from the abstract 
to the concrete than to endeavor so to live 
that Christ will approve his life." 

The place conceded to Christ, sometimes 
cheerfully and sometimes grudgingly, by 
the Heresiarchs of culture, like the German 
Goethe and the English Arnold, and by men 
of such piercing intelligence and far-reach- 
ing voices as Carlyle and Tennyson, Brown- 



158 THE LIVING CHRIST 



ing, Longfellow and Lowell, Lincoln, Glad- 
stone and Bright, and Lord Kelvin, is strik- 
ingly different from that which the Babe of 
Bethlehem found waiting for Him on His 
coming. The tightly closed doors of the 
village Caravansary were the outward sign 
of the inward conviction in the hearts of 
most men, who gave the matter any con- 
sideration whatever, that this Child of the 
Manger was as superfluous as He was in- 
significant. What mattered an unknown 
babe to any one, except to the young Jewish 
mother, who clasped Him with convulsive 
love in her arms, as if she alone would at 
least protect Him from a world which she 
could not compel to receive Him? 

To that mother the only world for which 
she cared or of which she knew was the 
world whose center was the temple in the 
Holy City, and whose destiny was sup- 
posedly in the hands of the priests of the 
temple and the members of the Sanhedrim, 
the seventy most influential men of the na- 
tion, who made the edifice in which they 
met both a City Hall and a National Capitol. 
This Hebrew world of iron-clad ceremonial- 
ism, of puerile and superstitious observ- 



THE PLACE OP CHRIST 159 



ances, was a world in which an ecclesiastical 
syndicate had so capitalized the religious 
feelings of the people that it was impossible 
to sacrifice a bird even the size of a dove, 
without paying tribute to their treasury. 
The leaders of this world concluded very 
sensibly, from the only facts admitted into 
their horizon, that a man, claiming to be 
either a Messiah or a Super-man, coming 
with a mission to deliver the people from 
all tyranny political, intellectual or spiritual, 
would be a menace to their power and a 
destroyer of all their delightful and inter- 
esting prerogatives. Prejudice and self- 
interest closed the frowning gates of the 
temple at Jerusalem against Him as tightly 
as ignorance and indifference had closed 
the doors of the inn at Bethlehem. 

This Hebrew world, like all worlds of any 
century or name, governed by bigoted re- 
ligiosity, grew increasingly confident that 
all its prognostications were correct, when 
Christ openly stated His program in 
Nazareth to those who had known Him in 
His boyhood. " 1 The spirit of the Lord is 
upon me, because He has anointed me to 
preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent 



160 THE LIVING CHRIST 



me to heal the broken hearted, to preach 
deliverance to the captives, and recovering 
of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them 
that are bruised, to preach the acceptable 
year of the Lord/ And He closed the book 
and gave it again to the minister and sat 
down, and the eyes of all them that were in 
the synagogue were fastened on Him," — as 
the eyes of the most serious minded men 
have been ever since. Before His short 
sermon was half over most of the Naza- 
renes were satisfied that there was no place 
for Him whatever in their world. Their 
action was unhesitating and logical. "And 
all in the synagogue when they heard these 
things were rilled with wrath and rose up 
and thrust Him out of the city and led Him 
unto the brow of the hill where their city 
was built that they might cast Him down 
headlong." What an innumerable multi- 
tude through the ages have risen up with 
the same wrath in their hearts burning 
against this inconvenient and impossible 
Christ! They have strained every muscle 
to cast Him headlong into some bottomless 
abyss of forgetfulness. 
As the Hebrew ecclesiastical world heard 



THE PLACE OF CHEIST 161 



more of His teaching their wrath glowed 
with fiercer heat. Intentionally or uninten- 
tionally — they cared very little which — al- 
most everything He said hit them hard and 
hurt. The whole Sermon on the Mount, — 
especially the Beatitudes, — was an insidious 
insult to the scribes and Pharisees, indi- 
vidually and collectively. The blessings 
Christ pronounced so confidently on quali- 
ties like meekness, mercifulness and purity, 
and on all hearts hungry for righteousness, 
are so familiar to us that we hear them read 
as placidly as if they were platitudes, but 
they were radical and revolutionary to the 
scribe, the Pharisee, the Sadducee and the 
ruling classes. Such generalities further- 
more were soon merged into particular and 
definite charges, made openly and in such a 
way that no one could doubt who was 
meant. " You are putting a yoke upon the 
people that they are unable to bear, and 
you yourselves — hypocrites — do not touch 
it with one of your fingers ; you have no love 
for the truth ; your reliance is on authority, 
and the authority of tradition not of the 
Law or the Prophets." 

When they saw what He did on the Sab- 



162 THE LIVING CHEIST 



bath day, that He took some of the heads 
of wheat in His hand — which was " work- 
ing " — and that He separated the seed from 
the husks, — which was adding work to 
work, offense to offense — and that He ate 
the grain, the result of forbidden toil on the 
sacred day — they counted all this Sabbath 
desecration a very serious matter indeed, 
a far worse sin, in their eyes, than fraud, 
chicanery, injustice and inhumanity. When 
they heard Him say " the Sabbath is made 
for man " — not for the Jew exclusively but 
for humanity, they remembered the state- 
ments of their Rabbis: "The world was 
created in order that the Sabbath might be 
kept " and that the Jew was the only man 
asked to keep it. " Now this upstart, this 
Nazarene, ignorant of all our infallible 
teachers have taught for centuries, or, if not 
ignorant, indifferent, overthrows in a sen- 
tence a structure which is the peculiar pride 
of our nation." 

It is true the people, " counted accursed 
because they knew not the law," were on 
His side; and when they heard Jesus say, 
" O generation of vipers," " O whited sepul- 
chers," " O hypocrites," they smiled their 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST 163 



approval and laughed at the very men be- 
fore whom until now they had trembled. 
That laugh may have sealed Christ's 
doom. 

" He came unto His own, and His own re- 
ceived Him not." The rejection of the Mes- 
siah does not close the history of the Jewish 
people. They believed that in removing 
Christ they had removed the greatest ob- 
stacle from their path; they reckoned ill, for 
they left great Caesar out. Losing patience 
at last with a persistent piety which he 
could not understand and with which he had 
no sympathy, Titus captured and destroyed 
the city after the people had endured un- 
speakable suffering. The Temple has 
ceased to exist, but the soul of the Hebrew 
world, as Christ and His apostles knew and 
loved it, and which the Prophets strove 
to keep alive, still lives in the Christian 
Church. 

The place given Christ in the Roman 
world is still more astounding. The most 
brilliantly dramatic and bewildering pages 
in human history were written seven hun- 
dred and fifty years before the coming of 
Christ and three hundred years after the 



164 THE LIVING CHRIST 



splendors of Solomon's reign had faded 
away. 

Every epoch in Roman history is of thrill- 
ing interest, from the first page to the last. 
Shining names and splendid deeds flash 
across the sky like signals sent up into the 
night. Horatii struggle with Curiatii, 
patricians with Tarquins. Horatius Codes 
holds the bridge single-handed against the 
whole army of Lars Porsena. The heroic 
Metius Curtius mounts his war-horse and 
plunges, a voluntary sacrifice, into the abyss 
which had been opened in a night by some 
angry deity, and which then closed forever. 
Cincinnatus, the farmer-warrior-ruler, leaves 
his plow in the furrow and captures the 
army of his enemies. Macedonia is con- 
quered, and Carthage is destroyed. 

A warlike people these Romans; but not 
only brave, as even warlike people some- 
times are, but truthful, honest, and, most 
remarkable of all, clean and chaste. For 
one hundred and seventy years no divorce 
was given or asked. Macaulay, it may be, 
has colored the picture a little too highly, 
but it is true in its outlines to life in the days 
of the Republic. 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST 165 



* Then none was for a party, 

And all were for the state ; 
Then the rich man helped the poor man, 

And the poor man loved the great; 
Then lands were fairly portioned, 

And spoils were fairly sold; 
And the Romans were like brothers — 

In the brave days of old." 

The Republic transformed into the Em- 
pire was much more splendid with imperial 
pomp and gorgeous robes — but death was 
hidden beneath the brocade. The Empire 
spread till it covered the civilized world. 
On the west was the ocean, but on the 
north the boundary was the Danube, on the 
east the Euphrates and on the south 
Ethiopia. But all sense of solidarity, 
naturally enough, had disappeared. The 
Romans were no longer like brothers ; there 
were too many of them, it was not to be 
expected. They no longer felt any sense 
of relationship each to the other. Every 
man was for his party, which meant him- 
self, just so far as he dared ; but every man 
under compulsion was ready to assert that 
he was first and last and all the time for 
the Emperor. Caesar might be a madman, 



166 THE LIVING CHEIST 



like Caligula, or he might be an idiot, like 
Heliogabalus — but he was the equal of the 
gods. There were more altars, it is said, 
in Rome, to " divus Caesar," than to all the 
rest of the gods put together. The deifica- 
tion of the Roman emperors does not seem 
to us to be a question of the first im- 
portance, but how tremendous its influence 
must have been we can see by the fact that 
this is still one of the vital subjects under 
discussion by both American and European 
archaeological institutes. 

The conquest of this Roman Empire by 
the new religion would be incredible if it 
were not historical. Lecky calls it the mar- 
vel of the world, " incomprehensible and 
undeniable." Multitudes of men and women 
left the Coliseum with its cruel sports, its 
sands stained with blood, where the court 
gathered, and all the aristocracy. They 
turned their backs on the House of Mirth, 
and a little later they were found wor- 
shiping Christ, that crucified Jew, in the 
catacombs. Myriads of them gave their 
lives for their faith. 

Rome welcomed to her Pantheon, with 
tolerant indifference, every god of every 



THE PLACE OP CHEIST 167 

people that she had conquered. But Chris- 
tianity brought upon itself ten and more 
terrible persecutions by its inflexibility. 
The new religion was not willing to take its 
place in the Pantheon and say that Christ 
was a god like the other gods. Christianity 
insisted upon the worship of Jesus Christ 
and Him alone, and all these idols were to 
bow before Him — " Worship Him all ye 
gods." Naturally the Roman in spite of 
his indifference was irritated by the ex- 
clusiveness of the Asiatic parvenu. He 
fought hard but in the end he bowed his 
proud neck to the yoke which only the 
weary and heavy laden find light. 

The place Christ gained in the Greek 
world was won in a different way. The 
Greek was the intellectual aristocrat of an- 
tiquity. He had probably the finest quality 
of brain fibre ever put into a human skull. 
He would not acknowledge that he was 
supercilious, but he would have confessed 
that he was conscious of his superiority to 
the rest of mankind. Unless a man could 
speak Greek and think Greek, and had Greek 
blood in his veins, whatever else he might 
be, to the Greek he was a Barbarian. The 



168 THE LIVING CHEIST 



Greek was ready to teach everybody. He 
was willing to be the guide and the philoso- 
pher—but not the friend of the foreigner. 

" How did it come to pass," said Pro- 
fessor Bryce, walking with an American up 
the slopes of Pentelicus years ago, " that 
this little peninsula of Greece, nearly half 
of which is now in sight, produced in so 
short a time such intellectual marvels as the 
poems of Homer, the philosophies of Plato, 
Socrates and Aristotle, the histories of 
Thucydides and Herodotus and the sculp- 
tures of Phidias and Praxiteles?" No liv- 
ing man, it may be, could have answered 
that question more satisfactorily than Mr. 
Bryce himself, if any answer is possible. 

The Greeks had conquered the world 
twice — once by righting, and once by teach- 
ing. Alexander, though a Macedonian by 
birth, was a Greek by association and 
adoption. While still a boy, the world 
lay at his feet. Like Napoleon at Tilsit, 
with kings crowding around him, each eager 
for some sign of recognition, Alexander had 
more than half the sovereigns of the world 
kotowing to him. He was the young Apollo 
in his triumphant car, driving the horses 



THE PLACE OF CHBIST 169 



of the sun! In reality he was a gorgeous 
butterfly carrying unconsciously on his 
wings the pollen of new manners, new cus- 
toms, a new language, and a new literature. 
" His death,'' Dean Stanley said, " ended 
Greek history, but began Greek influence." 
Then commenced the second world con- 
quest by the Greeks. The intellectual 
triumphs of Greece were far greater and 
more enduring than those won by weapons. 
In every city, even in Rome itself, there 
were Greek schools and Greek teachers. 

Robert Browning's pen portrait of Greek 
life about the time of the Crucifixion is a 
convincing picture. He tells of a certain 
Cleon, who lived among the " sprinkled 
isles where the light waves list Greece." 
He was a friend of one of the provincial 
kings. He writes a kind of a " bread and 
butter " letter in which he thanks the king 
for the benefits that he has showered upon 
him. The king's galley has just arrived at 
the port and is scarcely yet fully unladen. 
Cleon's courtyard is already piled high with 
royal gifts. He is elated with the thought 
of the king's favor, and by all the joy of 
life. But as he writes a cloud drifts across 



170 THE LIVING CHRIST 



the sky. He thinks of what awaits him, and 
his song drops into a minor key. 

" My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase 
The horror quickening still from year to year, 
The consummation coming past escape 
When I shall know most and yet least enjoy, 
When all my works, wherein I prove my worth 
Being present still, to mock me, in men's mouths 
Alive still in the praise of such as thou. 
I, I, the feeling, thinking, acting man, 
The man who loved his life so over-much 
Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible 
I dare at times imagine to my need 
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, 
Unlimited in capability 
For joy, as this is in desire for joy 
To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us, 
That stung by straitness of our life made strait 
On purpose to make prized the life at large, 
Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death 
We burst then as the worm into the fly, 
Who, while a worm still, wants his wings — 
But no, 

Zeus has not yet revealed it ; and, alas, 
He must have done so were it possible." 

Cleon goes on to say that a letter has 
been given him by a messenger who came 



THE PLACE OP CHEIST 171 



in the king's galley, addressed to Paulus, 
and Cleon feels quite sure that the king, 
troubled like himself, by questions about 
the future, which it has not disposed Zeus 
to answer, has turned to this Paulus or Paul, 
with the hope that even a despised Jew may 
succeed in solving some of the mysteries 
hidden from the wise Greek. Cleon thinks 
it a sad mistake. 

" Thou wrongest our philosophy, O king, 
In stooping to inquire of such an one, 
As if his answer could impose at all ! 
He writeth, doth he ? Well, and he may write. 
Oh, the Jew findeth scholars ! Certain slaves 
Who touched on this same isle, preached him 

and Christ; 
And (as I gathered from a bystander) 
Their doctrine could be held by no sane man." 

Cleon, had he been at Athens the day 
Paul preached on Mars Hill, would in all 
probability have taken his place among the 
little group, who, when they heard Paul 
speak of the Resurrection, laughed — it may 
be scoffingly, it may be hysterically — the 
thought was so extraordinary and so bound- 
less in its inferences. But some among that 



172 THE LIVING CHRIST 



little group did not laugh. They grasped 
Paul's hand and clung to him as the teacher 
for whom, unconsciously, their hearts had 
longed. Dionysius, the Areopagite, and a 
woman named Damaris, and some whose 
names were not written in the Acts, but 
were written in the book of life, found in 
Paul's gospel the power of God for the en- 
lightenment of their souls. Soon there 
were many such in other Greek cities. A 
great church was organized by Paul himself 
in Corinth. There were smaller churches 
also in Thessalonica and in Philippi. When 
we turn to the New Testament we read 
there letters of immense interest, written 
by this same Paul to these churches; two 
letters to Corinth; two letters to Thessa- 
lonica; and one to Philippi. 

So many Greeks became Christians that 
the Greek temples were forsaken. The 
Greek consecrated his wisdom to Christ. 
He was led by the failure of his philosophy 
as the Hebrew by the predictions of his 
prophets to that Jesus whom the Greeks at 
Jerusalem had been so eager to see. 

Is any man bold enough to say that Christ 
is to have a place in this modern world like 



THE PLACE OF CHKIST 173 



that given Him in either the Hebrew, Ro- 
man or Greek worlds? May it not be true 
that while He was large enough to be the 
Christ of the Hebrew peasant and the Ro- 
man and Greek common people, He is not 
large enough to be the Christ of our Euro- 
pean and American philosophers and scien- 
tists and merchants, men of affairs, " men 
of the world/' as we call them? May it not 
be sadly true that we must relegate Christ 
to the era in which He lived, just as we 
have relegated Buddha and Confucius and 
Zoroaster and Mohammed to the epochs in 
which they taught? Or may we still stand 
with Browning who hears John say as he 
lies in the Desert: 

" To me that story — ay that Life and Death 
Of which I wrote it was — to me it is 
— Is here and now : I apprehend nought else. 
Is not God now i* the world His power first 
made? 

Is not His love at issue still with sin, 
Visible when a wrong is done on earth ? 99 

Browning looked on the world with a 
poet's eyes, but Romanes was a scientist, 
called by his contemporaries the equal of 



174 THE LIVING CHRIST 



Darwin. He says in his "Thoughts on 
Religion " : 

" Now at one time it seemed to me impossible 
that any proposition, verbally intelligible as such, 
could be more violently absurd than that of the 
doctrine (of the Incarnation). Now I see that 
this standpoint is wholly irrational, due only to 
the blindness of reason itself promoted by 
(purely) scientific habits of thought. * But it is 
opposed to common sense ? ' No doubt, utterly 
so ; but so it ought to be if true. Common sense 
is merely a (rough) register of common experi- 
ence; but the Incarnation, if it ever took place, 
whatever else it may have been, at all events 
cannot have been a common event." 

Mr. Ruskin asserts in his stately hyper- 
bole that the hand of Christ smoothed the 
snows on the slopes of Lebanon and fash- 
ioned the hills lying beneath. That might 
be a difficult proposition to prove in prose, 
but is it not true that the hand of Christ 
has shaped our national life? While the 
Roman Empire claimed to be universal, 
while its sovereignty was supposed to be 
coterminous with the boundaries of the 
world, the Roman had no conception what- 
ever of solidarity and fraternity. In those 
days every tribe that had not yet been con- 



THE PLACE OF CHEIST 175 



quered, every people unsubdued, were sim- 
ply waiting their turn for some future con- 
quest. Every nation stood in antagonism 
to every other nation — the existence of any 
unconquered nation was an offense and a 
challenge. 

When Jesus Christ began to teach, all 
these different nations had different gods 
and each nation fought for the glory of its 
own gods. Jesus Christ said, " One is your 
Father, who is in Heaven, and all ye are 
brethren." That was the foundation of na- 
tional and international life. The logical 
order, as some one has pointed out, is not 
" Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," as the 
words are placed on the facades of the 
French churches, but as Christ taught, 
" Fraternity, Liberty, Equality." If I be- 
lieve that every man is my brother, then I 
want every man to have the same liberty 
that I have, and being brothers we must 
recognize each other as equals. 

The civilized world to-day professes to 
have accepted these principles, which have 
come from Jesus Christ. England says that 
all her prosperity is founded on them ; Italy, 
Spain, Germany, Austria, and Russia of- 



176 THE LIVING CHRIST 



ficially acknowledge Jesus Christ as King 
of Kings and Lord of Lords. France may 
no longer do so nationally, but she would 
feel hurt to-day should she be charged with 
having forsaken fundamental Christian 
principles. 

Our own national life sometimes seems 
to us like a spotted bird, but one of the 
sanest students of the whole subject says: 
" In spite of all our failures, our political 
communities are constitutionally on a 
Christian footing." He insists that the re- 
publican form of government is an ex- 
pression of the Christian spirit and methods. 
It is a form really successful only when 
founded on Christian fraternity; and out of 
that fraternity comes liberty and equality. 
We cannot be blind to the fact that Jesus 
Christ has moulded the social life of our 
modern world. He shaped it by a single 
sentence, when He said : " Thou shalt love 
thy neighbor as thyself," — " Thou shalt do 
to others as thou wouldst that they should 
do to thee." That was a new thought even 
for the thinkers : This man, uncongenial and 
irritating, is my other self, and I must treat 
him as I would wish myself — often uncon- 



THE PLACE OP CHEIST 177 



genial and irritating I must be to him — to 
be treated. Therefore I can't send him into 
the arena to shed his blood for my delecta- 
tion and amusement — so the Coliseum was 
closed — I can't enslave him and make him 
toil for my benefit — so at last the slaves' 
shackles have been broken — if I find him 
wounded, I must do for him what I would 
wish should be done for me; if I were down 
and out I must lift him up, take him to a 
place of safety and recuperation — so hos- 
pitals were established. If he is dead and 
his children are uncared for, I must do for 
them as I would like to have him do for my 
children under the same circumstances — so 
asylums were built. All the sweetness that 
has come into our social life has come 
through Jesus Christ; and every kind of 
contact of man with man, whether it be in 
work or in play, needs only to be permeated 
with that same spirit. I cannot compel 
my brother to work in conditions where I 
could not and would not work. I cannot 
exploit him for my own benefit — neither can 
I encourage him in indulgences and prac- 
tices which I know to be ruinous to my own 
soul. 



178 THE LIVING CHEIST 



Jesus Christ has shaped the intellectual 
life of our modern world. He taught men 
how to think. Great thinkers there were, 
it is true, before He came, but none who 
felt themselves free to think in every direc- 
tion. Jesus Christ took man into the tem- 
ple of truth and said, " There are no 
demons or gods here to be afraid of; it is 
all your Father's, you may go through every 
corridor and you will find only God." " Ye 
shall know the truth, and the truth shall 
make you free." Out of that fountain of 
living water came our great modern educa- 
tional institutions — Padua, Bologna, Ox- 
ford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Prince- 
ton — all founded for the glory of Christ, 
and for the Church. 

Out of that fountain, too, came our mod- 
ern sciences. The unity of nature and of 
God was the Ariadne's thread leading safely 
into the labyrinth and out of it. There are 
no antagonistic truths. No man need fear 
to think things through. Search the 
heavens and earth, and you will find " one 
God, one Law, one Element." 

As with Science, so with Literature and 
Art. Our modern poets, from Milton to 



THE PLACE OF CHEIST 179 



Tennyson, have sung their sweetest songs 
when the hand of Christ has laid hold upon 
their hearts. Our modern painters have 
painted their most glorious canvases when 
they have portrayed the Christ-child in the 
arms of the mother — or the good physician 
healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind. 
Our modern musicians, from Handel to 
Gounod, have sounded out their most 
heavenly harmonies when they have retold 
the story of Christ's life. 

Christ's hand has shaped the moral life 
of this modern world. Buddha and Con- 
fucius were satisfied when they could get 
their disciples not to do wrong, and Socrates 
was satisfied when he could get his disciples 
to do right; but Jesus Christ went deeper, 
He sounded the depths of thought, feeling, 
motive, and to Him it was not enough that 
a man should not do wrong, or that he 
should do right, he must be a devotee of 
truth and righteousness, and he must have 
as his motive brotherly kindness and love. 

There are certain qualities which do not 
exist in the pagan world and which are 
found in their completeness only in Chris- 
tendom. Gibbon is confident that it was 



180 THE LIVING GHEIST 



due to these qualities that the Christian 
Church spread: kindness, sympathy, truth- 
fulness, chastity, purity, self-sacrifice — be- 
cause she possessed these virtues, the 
Church triumphed. Gibbon appears to 
have taken slight interest in the philosophy 
of this phenomenon. How was it that a 
little sect, whose disciples were of humble 
origin, became so superior morally to both 
the Greek and Roman wise men? The an- 
swer to us is self-evident. They were 
products — products of a personal relation 
to Jesus Christ, and just in proportion to 
the closeness of that relation these products 
in their perfectness are still found. 

This same hand of Jesus Christ has 
shaped the religious life of our modern 
world. " He was the first being," it has 
been said, " who realized for man the idea 
of the divine." He it was who brought man 
and God into harmonious relations. Fichte, 
the German philosopher, says that " all who 
since Jesus Christ have come into union 
with God have come into union with God 
through Him " — consciously or uncon- 
sciously. Jesus Christ taught that man's 
relation to God is the foundation of all his 



THE PLACE OP OHEIST 181 



joy; that even duty, if he loves God, will 
become for him a delight. He drove away 
all the furies and fates. The angels sang 
when Christ was born : " Fear not; behold I 
bring you good tidings of great joy, which 
shall be to all people." And Jesus taught 
men always to rejoice in God. His apostles 
learned the lesson so well that even when 
Paul wrote back to Philippi, where he had 
most unpleasant associations, where he had 
been beaten with Roman whips and im- 
prisoned in a dark and damp dungeon, yet 
he writes, " Rejoice in the Lord, and again 
I say Rejoice." 

All lives are strong and beautiful and joy- 
ous so far as they are Christian. The som- 
breness and the gloom are gone. The 
songs are songs of praise and gladness. 
The voice that speaks for God is the voice 
that tells men of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 
Our whole religious life beginning with 
God, and spreading out until it includes 
men, man's relations to his fellows, man's 
relations to eternity, the forgiveness of sin, 
the redemption and the life to come — all 
these are complete, harmonious, joyous, 
only in Christ. 



182 THE LIVING CHUIST 



" Behold Him now where He comes, 
Not the Christ of our subtle creeds, 
But the light of our hearts, of our homes, 
Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs, 
The brother of want and blame, 
The lover of women and men, 
With a love that puts to shame 
All passions of human ken." 

Is this a picture of Jesus Christ in the 
modern world, painted not from fact, but 
from an iridescent dream? "The modern 
man does not bow his knee to Jesus Christ; 
the modern world does not follow Him " — 
So we have all heard it said with regret or 
delight: Where is this modern man in the 
modern world? Where is he to be found, 
for instance, on any Sunday morning? In 
the clubs, reading his newspaper, or out on 
the links with his golf sticks, or swinging 
along joyously over the unending white 
road in his automobile? Do you find him 
in the college fraternities, with his books, 
and his pipe, and his banjo? Where are , 
we to look for him on any week day? In 
the bustling activities of commercial, pro- 
fessional, and political life, where only the 
man with a strong head and a firm foot can 



THE PLACE OF CHRIST 183 



stand erect? Where do we find this mod- 
ern man, that neither bows his knee to 
Jesus Christ, nor takes any personal in- 
terest in Him? One of the ablest of our 
modern philosophers has said that we are 
to look for the modern world among men 
of light and leading, among men whose 
teaching represents universal tendencies. 
We are to find the modern world in those 
principles that are eternally significant, not 
in the little backwaters and eddies, but in 
the great currents that are sweeping ever 
onward. Finding it, we shall find that it is 
under the sway of Jesus Christ. This same 
philosopher goes on to say that " Chris- 
tianity consists not in institutions, but in 
ideas." There is one great institution, the 
visible Church, Roman Catholic or Protes- 
tant, which he thinks is not as satisfying to 
the modern man as it was to the mediaeval 
man; but the ideas which conquered the 
Roman Empire and which have transformed 
Europe are ideas which shall be satisfying 
to the end of time. 

The Christian world exists because of the 
ever-present spirit of Jesus Christ, and that 
spirit cannot be stabbed with any human 



184 THE LIVING CHEIST 



sword. "Alone," he continues — it is Pro- 
fessor Royce from whom I am quoting, in 
his great book on " The Problem of Chris- 
tianity " — " Alone I am lost, and am worse 
than nothing; I need a counsellor, I need 
my community. Interpret me. Let me 
join in this interpretation. Let there be the 
community. This alone is life. This alone 
is salvation. This alone is reality." What 
does he mean? Is not the invisible Church 
the community where the spirit of Christ 
dwells, and where there is life and salvation 
and reality? 

The modern man of the twentieth cen- 
tury, or of the fortieth — if there shall be a 
man then — must live, and hate and love, 
must sin and suffer and repent and long for 
light, and he shall find light then, just as the 
modern man finds it to-day, " in the light 
that lighteth " — that community the invis- 
ible Church, the whole company of believers 
and their children throughout the world. 

Sir Oliver Lodge, in " Science and Chris- 
tianity," says: 

" This perception of a human God, or of a 
God in the form of humanity is a perception 



THE PLACE OF CHBIST 185 

which welds together Christianity and Pantheism 
and Paganism and Philosophy. It has been 
seized and travestied by Comtists, whose God is 
rather limited to the human aspect instead of 
being only revealed through it. It has been 
preached by some Unitarians, though reverently 
denied by others and by Jews, who have felt 
that God could not be incarnate in man : * This be 
far from thee, Lord/ It has been recognized 
and even exaggerated by Catholics, who have al- 
most lost the humanity in the Divinity, though 
they tend to restore the balance by practical 
worship of the Mother and of canonical saints. 
But whatever its unconscious treatment by the 
sects may have been, this idea — the humanity of 
God or the Divinity of man — I conceive to be 
the truth which constituted the chief secret and 
inspiration of Jesus : ' I and the Father are one/ 
* My Father worketh hitherto, and I work/ 
4 The Son of Man/ and equally ' The Son of 
God/ * Before Abraham was I am/ ' I am in 
the Father and the Father in me/ And though 
admittedly ' My Father is greater than 1/ yet 
'he that hath seen me hath seen the Father'; 
and ' he that believeth on me hath everlasting 
life/ 

" The world has been slow to grasp the mean- 
ing of all this. The conception of Godhead 
formed by some devout philosophers and mystics 
has quite rightly been so immeasurably vast, 



186 THE LIVING CHEIST 



though still assuredly utterly inadequate and 
necessarily beneath reality, that the notion of a 
God revealed in human form — born, suffering, 
tormented, killed — has been utterly incredible. 
' A crucified prophet, yes ; but a crucified God ! 
I shudder at the blasphemy/ yet that apparent 
blasphemy is the soul of Christianity. It calls 
upon us to recognize and worship a crucified, an 
executed, God." 

Will the modern man ever look back, see- 
ing Christ only behind him? When the 
captain of the watch on a little schooner 
went below, he said to the man at the wheel, 
" Steer by the north star." Returning 
after a few hours, he looked around, startled, 
and shouted, "Where is the Star?" " Oh," 
said the sailor, " we passed it long ago." 
Your modern man at the wheel may tell 
you that he passed Jesus Christ when he 
was in college, or when he first entered upon 
a professional or commercial life, but in any 
case it was " long ago." " Swing her around 
on her course," said the captain of the 
watch; and, as the ship fell back, there, 
shining in the sky still ahead, was the north 
star. He who comes back upon his course 
and looks up will see still the only " star 



THE PLACE OP CHRIST 187 



that guides a human pathway, yours or 
mine." 

" Subtlest thought shall fail and learning falter, 
Churches change, forms perish, systems go ; 
But our human needs they will not alter — 
Christ no after age shall e'er outgrow." 

" Yea, amen ! O Changeless One. Thou only 
Art life's guide and spiritual goal, 
Thou the light across the dark vale lonely — 
Thou the eternal haven of the soul." 



VI 



CHRIST'S GOAL FOR HUMANITY 
CONSIDERING seriously Christ's 



" Counsel of Perfection ' — " Be ye 



therefore perfect even as your 
Father which is in Heaven is perfect " — 
it must plunge us into purgatorial depths 
of despair, or lift us to the most dazzling 
heights of hope. Taken literally as a 
condition of acceptance into the divine 
favor, or of availability for the most humble 
commission — we should not only see our- 
selves as counted out, but the whole human 
race as well in imminent danger of being 
assigned to the scrap heap. But, under- 
stood as an ultimate possibility, a God-ap- 
pointed goal for humanity, " The far-off 
divine event toward which the whole crea- 
tion moves," it is so incredibly inspiring as 
to be flatly inconceivable to all who believe 
that anything is " too good to be true." 
That counsel which has the appearance 




CHKISTS GOAL FOE HUMANITY 189 



of an authoritative command falls from the 
lips of One for whom the claim of having 
Himself stood on the heights to which He 
calls all men indiscriminately, has been per- 
sistently made for twenty centuries. Whit- 
tier, listening intently to His call, cries ex- 
ultantly : 

" I know the voice like none beside on land or sea 
Oh soul of mine rejoice, 
By all that He requires of me 
I know what God Himself must be. 

" Oh, Lord and Master of us all, 
Whate'er our name or sign 
We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call, 
We test our lives by Thine." 

The tones of that voice awaken har- 
monies before unheard in the human soul. 
Christ speaks to a longing in the heart of 
man that no eye had ever seen so clearly as 
his. Of Columbus it was said by one of 
his own countrymen, " The instinct of an 
unknown continent burned in him." To 
Christ that flaming instinct in every man's 
soul was as distinct as the burning bush to 
Moses on the edge of the desert. Not all 



190 THE LIVING OHEIST 



men look, like Columbus, for a continent; 
some like Abraham look for " a City which 
hath foundations, whose builder and maker 
is God." " The City of man's life fulfilled 
in God," as one of the great poet-prophets 
of New England phrased it. Toward that 
city, the land of the ideal, all patriarchs, 
prophets, reformers, and patriots have been 
pilgrims. 

The longing for perfection is the lure 
which the fingers of God wrought into the 
substance of the human soul on the day 
when He breathed into man the breath of 
life. A ceaseless yearning for " the best 99 
which he believes " is yet to be " has 
steadily enticed man upward. 

Primitive man in his cave, with his imple- 
ments and weapons of stone around him — 
if the picture the anthropologists and 
archaeologists give us of him is correct — 
saw no plans of improved dwellings hang- 
ing on the walls of his hut. No sketches of 
more effective tools of bronze or iron were 
scratched on the surface of the split log 
which served as a table. But there was a 
silent force surging within him, sure to 
create such weapons and tools later on. 



CHEIST'S GOAL FOE HUMANITY 191 



From that force would come also palaces 
and Parthenons, houses of parliament and 
domes of capitols. All the arts and sciences 
which give us the delightful sense of 
superiority over the savage and the bar- 
barian and the uncivilized and uncultured 
men of the past — ancestors of ours — were 
the product of this unappeased hunger 
gnawing at the heart of humanity. Every 
fact found, — aesthetic or scientific, called for 
its related and correlated facts as birds call 
for their mates. 

Convinced that facts existed, lying be- 
yond the range of vision, primitive man, as 
he became more civilized, augmented his 
visual powers by the telescope and the 
microscope. When his voice could not 
carry far enough to reach his distant tribes- 
man, he increased its projective power by 
the telegraph and the telephone. Having 
commandeered iron and steel and steam he 
secured speed control surpassing the ante- 
lope and the eagle. Yet the modern in- 
ventor, thinking of scientific and mechanical 
perfection, still says : " Not as though I had 
already attained." But aspiration is on 
fire, and anticipation sees the prize dancing 



192 THE LIVING CHEIST 



almost within reach — its spirals converging 
upon the point where he stands. 

When it dawns upon this highly civilized, 
scientific, mechanical expert that life is more 
than things, even though called by technical 
Greek terms, more than physical adjust- 
ments, more than the relations of facts, how- 
ever significant — he becomes conscious — 
and that will be the crowning moment of 
his life — of a longing for moral perfection. 
He finds within his soul a hunger for 
righteousness, as real and persistent as the 
hunger of his body for bread, and of his 
mind for facts. 

Now that his soul is awake, he is self-ac- 
cused of innumerable failures, caused by 
ignorance or indifference, or willfulness. 
He is like a pedestrian who slips and falls 
and looks to see if there have been wit- 
nesses of his mishap — serious enough to 
him, but strangely laughable to them. 
Slipping into the moral mire the Pilgrim 
gazes upward to discover whether there 
may be any awful Eyes looking down on 
him. 

To be on the safe side, he speaks in a 
supplicating voice ; he kneels reverently and 



CHRIST'S GOAL FOR HUMANITY 193 



lifts his hands pleadingly. Remembering 
how fond he himself is of gifts he offers 
handfuls of the things he prizes most to the 
gods of whose existence he is not certain 
but whom he thinks it best to placate, if 
there should happen to be such beings. He 
has begun what our modern theologians call 
" his search for safe conduct " — a search 
like that in which even ambassadors must 
sometimes engage when they are about to 
pass over a dangerous and exposed sea. 
The sea of life is both dangerous and ex- 
posed for all who cross it and a safe con- 
duct is essential. But safety alone is not 
sufficient. A message to satisfy the soul 
must tell the suppliant that the Supreme 
Power of the universe is friendly and for- 
giving, sympathetic and compassionate — 
that he may count on something more than 
protection. If he may go so far as to be- 
lieve that this Power is a person, then he 
may go still further and believe that this 
Person's control of the heavens and earth is 
so complete that for those who put them- 
selves under His convoy all things must 
work concordantly for good. 

This is the message Paul gave to his 



194 THE LIVING CHEIST 



pagan audience on Mars Hill. He swiftly 
outlined the religious history of humanity — 
that history which was written in hiero- 
glyphics in temples and statues around and 
above him. He spoke of altars to " known 
and unknown gods," altars that smoked 
with sacrifices which the offerer hoped 
would procure him a " safe conduct." He 
pointed to the superb statues which filled the 
city and that made the Parthenon glorious. 
He reminded them of the age-long prayers 
and efforts of their ancestors, in their tire- 
less attempts to establish friendly relations 
with divine forces. But God, he says, does 
not care for the altar or the sacrifice upon 
it. He does care for the man who made 
the altar and brings the sacrifice. God is 
not like these statues — superb as they are, 
but He is like the sculptors who made the 
statues. " Forasmuch then as we are the 
offspring of God, we ought not to think that 
the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or 
stone graven by art and man's device." 
What God covets and demands is not the 
building of a temple on a hill, or the carving 
of a statue for a street corner, but a feeling 
in the soul — the result of looking into the 



CHRIST'S GOAL FOR HUMANITY 195 



realities of life — regret for the errors of the 
past, and remorse for its misdeeds. " God 
now commandeth all men everywhere to 
repent." 

" Just before you," says the apostle, " is a 
throne of judgment." It is not Jupiter who 
is to be seated on that throne, judging in 
irritation and jealousy and spite and envy, 
according to the mood of the moment, but 
a Man whose right to judge has been estab- 
lished by His conquest over death, a Man 
who is to judge in righteousness — the 
quality for which every man's soul hungers. 
In Him is that safe conduct for which the 
world so long sought; in Him is the satis- 
faction of the soul; in Him the complete- 
ness of all man's incompleteness. So 
Phillips Brooks, preaching in England, said: 
" In Him there is the perfectness of every 
occupation, the perfect trading, the perfect 
housekeeping, the perfect handicraft, the 
perfect school teaching; they are all in 
Him." And so too, we may add, are the 
perfect citizenship and the perfect states- 
manship, the perfect saint and the perfect, 
soldier. 

Amiel, the poet philosopher of Geneva, 



196 THE LIVING CHEIST 

finds that the object and aim of Christianity 
is perfection, and the means is Christ, and 
the evidence that that means is proving 
effective, in any particular instance, is 
Christlikeness. " Our aspirations," he says, 
" after perfection, are prophetic. They 
could only have come into being by the 
action of the same cause which will enable 
them to reach their goal." To hold fast this 
anticipation of perfection is not " to dance 
a minuet with the phantoms of hope." 
" Being confident of this very thing, that 
He which hath begun a good work in you 
will perform it unto the day of Jesus 
Christ." 

Paul explains that the persistent forth- 
putting of his own energy had but one pur- 
pose — " That we may present every man 
perfect in Christ Jesus." Professor Peabody 
in his essay on Religious Education con- 
fesses his consciousness of a similar purpose 
in his own activities. " Every step," he 
writes, " in this series of reflections on re- 
ligious education, brings one nearer to a 
single personality and influence. It is as 
though one's thought had revolved in the 
circumference of life and was finally drawn, 



CHKIST'S GOAL FOE HUMANITY 197 



as by some law of spiritual attraction, to- 
ward a single center. Each line of discus- 
sion or description as it has been followed 
to its interior meaning has led to some 
aspect of the teaching or example of Jesus 
Christ, not as a theological assumption or 
as an ecclesiastical demand but as a logical 
and inevitable point toward which all these 
various considerations move as one passes 
from the circle of his thoughts to its center; 
then is rediscovered the interpretative 
power of that teaching and one's own con- 
clusions converge from their various in- 
terest on that authority." 

Yet the introduction of a person who 
lived a long time ago and about whom not 
as much is known as we might wish, is to 
confuse and complicate the problem — so 
many honest souls believe. " We too dream 
of perfection," they say, " but if it is ever to 
be a personal possession, it must be by our 
own personal efforts." To look to any one 
except ourselves for it is to count on a kind 
of substitution which is practically a subter- 
fuge. We are inclined to think the High 
Priest of culture is right when he asserts 
that " In the harmonious development of 



198 THE LIVING CHEIST 



all our powers the method of culture is 
superior to the method of religion." The 
method of culture concentrates our hopes 
upon ourselves; the method of Christianity 
concentrates our hopes upon the Person 
whom Professor Peabody sees standing at 
"the center toward which all the lines of 
human hope and aspiration converge." 

However much the dependence of our 
personality upon another may be disliked 
and deprecated, it cannot be denied that life 
is full of it. The perfecting of our person- 
ality by the persistent steady pressure of a 
larger, nobler personality is a stimulating 
transformation always in sight. A great 
poet describes one of his characters wedded 
to a noble woman, as " beginning to be like 
his wife — renovated, able to do now all her- 
self had done risen to the height of her." 

Dissecting and analyzing personality into 
Reason, Will, Affection, the shaping energy 
of each is self-evident. All education pro- 
ceeds on the supposition that intellect 
shapes intellect. Thought is an inexhaust- 
ible storage battery like radium. Invisible 
javelins of light are shot from an undetected 
center whose existence can only be inferred 



CHRIST'S GOAL FOR HUMANITY 199 



from its products. A thought is a seed, 
whose vitality is imperishable — it is in- 
different to space and impervious to time. 
It was long supposed that the Egyptian 
lotus was an imaginary flower that never 
had existed except in the minds of the sculp- 
tors who carved it in a. conventional way 
as an ornament on the walls of palaces and 
temples — but a while ago the lotus was 
found blossoming along the Nile. The ex- 
planation was that lotus seeds had fallen 
from the broken cerements of mummied 
kings torn from tombs hidden far away in 
the desert. These seeds had been carried 
by the wind over the land to the rich river 
soil and there finding congenial lodgment 
they soon burst into blossoms of beauty. 

Thoughts from the monarchs of the mind, 
" The dead but Sceptred Sovereigns whose 
spirits still rule ours from out their urns," 
turned to dust a thousand years ago, and, a 
thousand miles away, have been carried in 
a flight no eye could follow to their resting 
place in the receptive soil of a soul. Homer, 
Dante, Shakespeare, Milton have impreg- 
nated innumerable spirits with the pollen of 
poetry. Thucydides, Tacitus, Mosheim, 



200 THE LIVING CHRIST 



Gibbon, Macaulay have stimulated the 
brains of countless scholars to a white heat 
in which disconnected facts have been fused 
into histories. Because of thinkers long 
" dead and turned to clay," generations yet 
unborn will sing songs yet unknown. They 
will tell the story of nations whose natal day 
has not yet dawned. Even to the half 
educated and semi-civilized, the influence 
and inspiration of intellect, of invisible 
thought, takes its place among the un- 
deniable forces that are shaping life. 

The influence of will upon will is scarcely 
less evident than the influence of intel- 
lect upon intellect. We jostle constantly 
against men who never read poems or write 
histories, but their lives are dramas. Their 
deeds make the stuff out of which literature 
is woven. They are men of indomitable 
resolution, of unalterable purpose, of dogged 
determination. In the railway wreck, the 
burning building, the sinking ship, the 
devastating flood, the very presence of such 
men prevents a panic. They take their 
place inevitably as leaders, as Paul did on 
the deck of the Alexandrian corn ship, 
plunging on the reef at Malta. 



CHKIST'S GOAL FOE HUMANITY 201 



The influence of affection, on heart, and 
life, is a matter of memory. We were all 
loved out of innumerable vicious imperfec- 
tions by fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, 
friends. It was not because these in- 
fluential individuals were giants of intellect 
or will, " monsters of cerebral activity " or 
resoluteness, that their power was what it 
was and still is, though the grass has long 
been green over their graves. It was the 
resistless energy of their purity, truth, sym- 
pathy, self-sacrifice — love that made for 
character in those whose lives they touched. 
The sum of all they were still exists and 
stands as a personality across the path and 
beckons the hesitating on, or bids the 
tempted back. A young American in 
Rome, who had lost the little religion he 
brought with him to the Eternal City, 
started one night for the street determined 
to enjoy himself at any cost. As he 
reached the door and turned the knob, he 
heard his mothers voice — she had been 
dead a decade — saying plainly, " Don't! my 
son, don't!" "I know," he said, telling 
the story afterward, " that no sounds had 
entered my ear, but something found its 



202 THE LIVING CHEIST 



way to my soul." He had felt the influence, 
not of his mother's intellect or will, but of 
her character—of what she was, the self of 
herself. 

Human spirits meet and mold each other; 
they shape character and destiny. But 
what evidence have we that any such in- 
fluence is exerted on man by a Divine Per- 
sonality ? 

The world recognizes the influence of 
Divine Intellect flashing down from the 
sky on human intellect. Stars and suns, 
laws and forces are words and sentences 
with which the divine interprets itself to the 
human, and in that interpretation shapes 
and fashions man. " I think God's thoughts 
after Him," cried the great astronomer. 
Whoever thinks God's thoughts thinks for 
that moment divinely. Every fact of 
nature, like Plato's " Rose," is a thought of 
God. Every discovery and invention is a 
result of the inspiration that comes from the 
impact of the divine intelligence upon the 
human intellect. The Keplers, Newtons, 
Faradays, Stevensons, Fultons, Henrys, 
Edisons, Marconis, Bells are proof to the 
world that the mind which created the uni- 



CHKIST'S GOAL FOE HUMANITY 203 



verse is stimulating the intelligence of re- 
ceptive men. 

The world recognizes the influence of 
Divine Will as well as intellect. It sees it 
in the storm and in the sunlight. Unmoved 
by the upheavals that rock nations and cen- 
turies, it has its way even now in the 
heavens, arranging and directing the move- 
ments of vast systems from untold aeons. 
" Through the ages one increasing purpose 
runs." That will is beginning to have its 
way with man on the earth. 

" Step by step since time began 
I see the constant gain of man." 

The divine purpose for humanity is work- 
ing out to a glorious consummation, " When 
all things shall be gathered together in one, 
and God shall be all in all." Men who do 
not think of themselves as religious are 
compelled by what they see above and 
around them to incorporate some such con- 
clusion in their philosophy. 

The world recognizes as well the in- 
fluence of the Divine Character. The good- 
ness of God has become visible to all eyes 
not blinded by excess of light or prejudice. 



204 THE LIVING CHRIST 



" From the first power was, I know, 
Life has made clear to me, 
Strive for a closer view, 
Love were as plain to see." 

" Where see ? when there dawns a day 
If not on this sinful earth 
On yonder star away 
Where the good and the true have birth 
And power comes full in play." 

Christ taught His disciples that " Love 
is plain to see, even on this sinful earth, not 
only in the light, but in the darkness; not 
only in flowers and birds, but in storms and 
catastrophes. " Even so, Father, for so it 
seemeth good in Thy sight " calmed and 
satisfied His soul while He waited for the 
mysteries to clear. 

Under the ceaseless pressure of this good- 
ness a new heavens have arched themselves 
over us and a new earth has risen up beneath 
us. Hospitals, homes, asylums, schools, col- 
leges, universities are the evidences of 
human sympathy blossoming from the plant 
of divine love. " Cologne Cathedral," it is 
said, " proves the skill of the architects, 
their devotion to a superb plan, but the 



CHRIST'S GOAL FOR HUMANITY 205 

little town of KaiserwOrth, a few miles from 
Cologne, with its countless institutions of 
philanthropy, proves the life-giving power 
of Christianity." That life-giving power 
pours forth from the inexhaustible fountain 
of God's goodness. To remove or turn 
aside that living stream would be like divert- 
ing the water which has made a garden of 
the desert. 

Wherever there is a man who was once a 
tyrant in the home, or a despot in the office, 
who was hard toward strength and cruel 
toward weakness; wherever there is a hu- 
man being eager for pleasure, pomp, power, 
giving no encouragement to any enterprise 
that promises little personal profit; wher- 
ever there is a brute with the appetite of a 
vulture, feeding on carrion, and tossing mor- 
sels now and then to all who wish to share 
his bestializing banquet; wherever there is 
a business man whose commercial transac- 
tions would not appear to advantage on any 
ledger or day book, who is altogether in- 
different to principles and moral considera- 
tions, — wherever these or such as these now 
pray like Saul of Tarsus, " Lord, what wilt 
Thou have me to do?" or, like Zaccheus, 



206 THE LIVING CHRIST 



make a fourfold restitution to those they 
have wronged, or, like Mary Magdalene, 
conscious of sin and full of shame, come 
humbly to Christ's feet, pouring out upon 
them the ointment of sorrow and repent- 
ance — there the personality of Christ is 
visibly pressing a soul up toward perfection. 

We thrill under the influence of divine 
intellect; we tremble under the influence of 
divine will, but we soften and surrender un- 
der the influence of the divine character, 
gentleness, pity and love. 

We are shaped by His Spirit into His 
likeness. The mind in us is like the mind 
in Him. " To be like Christ is to be saved, 
and to be perfectly like Christ is complete 
salvation." Victor Hugo calls man " the 
tadpole of an archangel." It is striking and 
possibly vaguely stimulating — but Christ 
calls man a Son of God. " Be ye therefore 
perfect even as your Father which is in 
Heaven is perfect." " Now are we the Sons 
of God and it doth not yet appear what we 
shall be." " Man partly is and wholly hopes 
to be." " In completed man begins anew a 
tendency to God." When we fasten our 
eyes on Christ faculties we have never 



CHBIST'S GOAL FOE HUMANITY 207 



used stir within us; the soul hears the call 
of its Divine Mate and Master — -and is 
entranced with the vision of the place by 
Christ's side, prepared and reserved for the 
eager and loyal. " The building of the per- 
fect man is the noblest work that can go on 
in the world. It is the very crown of God's 
creation." Says Phillips Brooks, " It is 
Christ's Goal for Humanity." 

By the side of the " Great Heart of the 
Pulpit " stands a modern philosopher and 
asserts : " Toward the spiritual perfection 
of Humanity the stupendous momentum of 
the cosmic process has all along been tend- 
ing. That spiritual perfection is the true 
goal of evolution, the divine end that was 
involved in the beginning. When Huxley 
asks us to believe that " the cosmic process 
has no sort of relation to moral ends," I feel 
like replying with the question, " Does not 
the cosmic process exist purely for the sake 
of moral ends?" Subtract from the uni- 
verse its ethical meaning, and nothing re- 
mains but an unreal phantom, the figment 
of false metaphysics." Prophets, poets and 
philosophers are all plodding along together 
on the same sunlit road. The goal which 



208 THE LIVING CHRIST 



all seers alike place before humanity is to 
be reached by only one path — Truth. " One 
truth leads right to the world's end." It is 
the hope of Paracelsus as of Paul in appre- 
hending the perfection for which also he be- 
lieves he was apprehended. — 

" But friends, 
Truth is within ourselves — it takes no rise 
From outward things whate'er you may believe. 
There is an inmost center in us all, 
Where truth abides in fulness ; and around 
Wall upon wall the gross flesh hems it in. 
This perfect clear perception — which is truth. 
A baffled and perverting carnal mesh 
Binds it and makes all error; and to know 
Rather consists in opening out a way 
Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, 
Than in effecting entry for a light 
Supposed to be without." 

Truth is a torch as well as an inward light, 
a torch that illumines the way to the heights. 
Only truth-guided men — and all men obedi- 
ent to truth are so guided — may hope to ar- 
rive. The leading question Christ often put 
to the men He met was concerning their 
attitude to Truth. He did not ask about 



CHRIST'S GOAL FOR HUMANITY 209 



wealth, rank, education, but " what do you 
believe about Truth?" "What do you 
think of it?" There is no hope for the 
man who turns his back on it. 

This was the unpardonable sin of the 
cliques combined against Him. To them 
the truth was worth what you can do with 
it and get out of it. Of all the higher uses 
and values of truth they knew nothing. 
They were on a lower level even than 
Pilate who was as doubtful about the 
reality of truth as we are about the pos- 
sibility of perpetual motion. Christ treated 
him with greater consideration apparently 
than He showed His Jewish opponents who 
saw the truth with both eyes but were con- 
vinced there was nothing in it for them at 
that stage of the proceedings. 

Christ was ready to touch Pilate's eyes 
and to open them so wide that he might see 
a kingdom very different from that with 
which he had dealt in a diplomatic and mili- 
tary way since he was a boy. While Pilate 
knew nothing of this kingdom of truth, he 
did, like every other man, know something 
about the truth on which that kingdom is 
founded. Whenever he saw his slaves plow- 



210 THE LIVING CHEIST 



ing and sowing and gathering the harvest 
he saw the truth as it is in the soil, in the 
sun and in the seed. From the same seed 
every year he reaped the same kind of a 
harvest. He knew agricultural truth; the 
correspondence between the Farmer's 
thought and the things which he raises on 
his farm. 

Whenever Pilate watched the Roman 
ships shoot out on the sea, he saw some- 
thing of maritime truth. The captains of 
these vessels knew about tides and cur- 
rents and the effect of the wind upon the 
little sails which from time to time they 
raised to steady their course or to increase 
their speed. He saw the correspondence 
between their thoughts and the things in 
which they were constantly engaged. They 
knew the truth about ships and their way 
with the sea and the way of the sea with 
them. 

Pilate had doubtless often seen his sol- 
diers stand in sport before a cliff shouting 
out some word — usually the word that was 
so sweet to the lips of the Roman, " Bel- 
lum"; or when they had, as even the 
Romans sometimes did have, enough of 



CHRIST'S GOAL FOR HUMANITY 211 



war, they shouted " Pax " — but always 
there came back from the cliff the same 
word which had been shot against it. That 
was the truth of sound; the correspond- 
ence between their thoughts and the 
thing against which their thoughts were 
flung. 

" Truth," Pilate said to Christ, " What is 
Truth? " But there were a thousand kinds 
of truth of which he knew quite enough to 
understand that there were other kinds of 
truth that may be discovered by proper 
methods. He had gone but a little way 
into the kingdom of truth, only to its gates, 
but Christ spoke as if it needed no more 
faith, except in the first few steps, to enter 
into the kingdom of truth, than to enter into 
any other kingdom, and each step proves 
itself, and becomes self-evidencing. 

Pilate knew the difference between the 
Stoic and the Epicurean, and he would have 
said, without any hesitation, the Stoic has 
entered further into certain truths than his 
pleasure-loving neighbor. The Epicurean 
knew all about the joys of self-indulgence 
and of self-gratification, but the Stoic knew 
of the far finer and higher joys of self-con- 



212 THE LIVING CHEIST 



trol and self-sacrifice. Pilate doubtless be- 
lieved that Seneca was a wiser man than 
Nero and that some of his own centurions, 
faithful to their duty, had a firmer grasp on 
reality than the man who lived in the golden 
house on the Palatine and held a sceptre in 
his hand that swayed the world. 

Every one who will may penetrate fur- 
ther into the kingdom of Truth even than 
the Stoic or than great Seneca himself. 
Christ is his leader. Christ shows the 
world the way into this kingdom of reality, 
and every man who follows Him will find 
that he has entered through the gates into 
the streets of the city, and around him will 
be monuments more majestic and splendid 
than those Pilate saw when he stood in the 
Forum and looked at the Capitol and the 
temples and the triumphal columns rising 
toward the sky. 

In this kingdom, which may seem as mys- 
terious to us as it did to Pilate, we may 
make use of the same tests with which we 
are all familiar. When a Saladin with the 
razor's edge of his delicate sword severs a 
filmy silken scarf with a single stroke ; or a 
Richard, the Lion Heart, with his massive 



CHRIST'S GOAL FOR HUMANITY 213 



battle-axe, cleaves asunder a metal helmet, 
each is doing just what he knows, and we 
know, he can always do under the same cir- 
cumstances. In the kingdom where Christ 
is king He puts a weapon into the hands of 
His subjects. It is as keen as the blade 
which Saladin swung with such skill, and 
as irresistible as the edge of King Richard's 
axe. It is " the sword of the Spirit, the 
Word of God." It cleaves asunder, not 
bone and muscle, like a Damascus blade, 
but the soul and spirit. It lays open the 
secrets of a man's heart and life. We may 
test it as Saladin and Richard tested their 
weapons. How does it work? Any man 
may try the sharp-cutting edge of a sen- 
tence like this : " Whatsoever ye would that 
men should do to you do ye even so to them 
likewise." He may begin at once in his 
own home with his wife, his father, his 
mother, his children. When he has com- 
pleted a series of experiments to his satis- 
faction he may look for results with con- 
fidence. 

Here is another keen-edged weapon: 
" Be not overcome of evil, but overcome 
evil with good." He may try that any day 



214 THE LIVING CHEIST 



on some of the people that he dislikes, and 
that dislike him> 

A'll may know if they will the joy which 
comes to those who win victories with such 
weapons, and that the rebound of these 
emotions upon the heart which gives them 
hospitable welcome is most agreeable. 
Only the man with a " heart of brass and 
a head of spelter " can resist these weapons 
from the armory of the King whose King- 
dom is Truth. 

The assured triumph of this kingdom is 
already in sight from some tall towers. 
Professor Fiske of Harvard University 
says : " The future is lighted for us with 
radiant colors of hope. Strife and sorrow 
shall disappear. Peace and love shall reign 
supreme. The dream of the poets, the 
lesson of the priest and prophet, the inspira- 
tion of the great musicians, is confirmed in 
the light of modern knowledge, and as we 
gird ourselves up for the work of life we 
may look forward to the time when in the 
truest sense the kingdoms of this world 
shall become the kingdom of Christ, and 
He shall reign forever and ever/' 

There comes a voice from England, in 



CHBIST'S GOAL FOE HUMANITY 215 



the same key with the voice of our own 
Professor. The Principal of the University 
of Birmingham, Sir Oliver Lodge, in his 
last book, " Raymond or Life and Death," 
sums up his convictions : " Those who think 
that the day of the Messiah is over are 
strangely mistaken; it has hardly begun. 
In individual souls Christianity has flour- 
ished and borne fruit, but for the ills of the 
world itself it is an almost untried panacea. 
It will be strange if this ghastly war sim- 
plifies and improves the knowledge of 
Christ and aids a perception of the ineffable 
beauty of His life and teaching, yet stranger 
things have happened, and whatever the 
churches may do, I believe that the call of 
Christ Himself will be heard and attended 
to by a large part of humanity in the near 
future as never yet it has been heard or at- 
tended to on earth. 

" My own time down here is getting short. 
It matters little, but I dare not go until I 
have borne this testimony to the grace and 
truth which emanates from that Divine 
Being, the realization of whose tender- 
hearted simplicity and love for man may 
have been overlooked at times and almost 



216 THE LIVING CHEIST 



lost by means of well-intentioned but im- 
proper dogma, but Who is accessible as al- 
ways to the humble and meek! " 

This triumphant vision of the kingdom 
of Truth spreading like light till it en- 
swathes the world, may not be so clear to 
our eyes. The two armies of light and of 
darkness, of force and faith, seem to be only 
too closely matched. The weapons that have 
won in unnumbered battles — " reeking tube 
and iron shard " — the colossal guns that 
scatter shrapnel and high explosives and 
deadly gases are still terribly effective. 
There is abundant room for doubt, we may 
think, whether the world is to belong ulti- 
mately to God or the Devil, to the Kingdom 
of Truth or the Kingdom of Lies. Timid 
souls hesitate on which side to throw them- 
selves. 

When Gonzalo Pizarro, worthy brother 
of Francisco, the bandit conqueror of Peru, 
made his final stand against the Spanish 
army sent to quell his rebellion, he was 
flushed with extraordinary triumphs gained 
over superior forces. He had every reason, 
he believed, to look forward to a decisive 
victory which would make him the absolute 



CHRIST'S GOAL FOR HUMANITY 217 



despot of a vast continent. But many- 
things had happened without his knowledge. 
His soldiers had breathed an atmosphere of 
doubt as to the legality of his cause and the 
authenticity of his title. Suddenly they 
saw the royal banner with the emblem of 
the Spanish crown upon it advancing up the 
slopes. Their flinty hearts trembled. A 
trusted captain rode over the hill and dis- 
appeared; a dozen musketeers followed. A 
squadron of horse sent in pursuit imitated 
their example. By fifties and hundreds 
Gonzalo's soldiers threw down their arms 
or silently took their place in the King's 
army. Without the firing of a shot Pizarro 
lost the battle that sealed his fate. 

The Prince of this world is flushed with 
many victories ; his forces are well equipped 
and entrenched. The father of lies is the 
sworn enemy of every kind of truth and of 
all to whom the truth as it is in Jesus is the 
hope of humanity in pressing toward the 
far-off goal. Since the white standard of 
the Cross was first unfurled no such 
triumphs have been won by the black flag 
as in these days when Christian armies are 
leaping at each other's throats. But the 



218 THE LIVING CHEIST 



ground beneath the feet of the invaders who 
have raised a revolt against the God of 
heaven and earth has been honeycombed. 
The atmosphere these satanic soldiers are 
breathing is saturated with doubt and mis- 
giving. " May it not be that our black flag 
is an offensive to Heaven, that the stars in 
their courses are fighting against us? " In 
such an hour as they think not fear will take 
hold upon them, and the mighty men and 
captains begin to cry, as John heard them 
long ago, to the mountains and rocks, " fall 
on us and hide us from the face of Him that 
sitteth on the throne." In such an hour as 
they think not, hope will come to the people 
poisoned by the venom of a delusive 
tyranny and they shall fall upon their knees 
and cry, " Blessed be the King that cometh 
in the name of the Lord." " Thou art the 
King of Glory, oh Christ, Thou art the 
Everlasting Son of the Father." Thou art 
the all glorious one who dost call us to be 
perfect even as our Father in Heaven is 
perfect. 



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